Forum Post: Congratulations, you're hurting them!
Posted 12 years ago on Dec. 12, 2011, 6:50 p.m. EST by TechJunkie
(3029)
from Miami Beach, FL
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Hurting the people you intended to hurt? I'm not sure about that part... But you're creating a disruption and doing damage to -- somebody, right? That's really the only real goal anyway, right?
In Oakland, the protests halted truck traffic at least two gates. Truck drivers, union and port officials and Oakland politicians have said the protests will hurt the incomes of people who have little connection to Wall Street.
"This is joke. What are they protesting?" Christian Vega, 32, who sat in his truck carrying a load of recycled paper from Pittsburg said Monday morning. He said the delay was costing him $600.
"It only hurts me and the other drivers. We have jobs and families to support and feed. Most of them don't," Vega said.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505245_162-57341669/oakland-longshoremen-sent-home-due-to-protests/
Is this really supposed to make people more sympathetic to Occupy's concerns?
The general consensus from the public view is the manner in which OWS is protesting is getting on the nerves of people that are directly inconvenience by the movements activities. Those people are telling other people and so and so on, in addition the media is not on your side.
Initially you got people to notice you and agree with many of the complaints you have and anyone interested in the movement natually come here to see what progress you are making. However, since many of you were too busy on the streets, little attention has been addressed to all of the negative comments on here. Many people see this website as a real link to finding out the truth since everyone doesn't trust the media anymore. Face it, if you can't control the content on this site, how is any of the masses going to believe that OWS can make a difference?
We live in a new era in history and while protests on the street may have worked in the past, they do not today. We have the technology to spread the word without being on the streets so please reconsider your methods.
All of that makes complete sense, and yes, that's why I've spent two days (so far) asking the same question: what was the purpose of the two separate shutdowns of the Port of Oakland. When the City of New York finally shut down the Zuccotti Park encampment, one of the quotes that I saw in the newspaper from one of the protesters there was that it didn't matter, because "the movement is online". So I'm here to ask my question.
My assumption is that if I can't get a coherent answer to my question on this site, then there is no coherent answer. If somebody spends two full days at the most prominent Occupy web site, totally focused on one question, engaging anybody who will discuss it as respectfully as possible, and he doesn't get an answer, then the answer doesn't exist.
And if the answer to that question doesn't exist, and that question doesn't really concern any of the Occupy supporters during those two days of conversation, then that affects my opinion of the Occupy movement a great deal. That total lack of consideration of the objectives of their actions, combined with total apathy toward the people who are inconvenienced by those actions, is what makes Occupy seem more like a domestic terrorist organization than a protest movement. A protest movement has a clear message that it wants to advance, and its goal is to sway public opinion. A group that's aimed at creating disturbances for the sake of creating disturbances is something else. A group that aims to sabotage commerce for no clear aim other than sabotage, with total disregard for public opinion, is not a protest group.
There is a cost of doing nothing, not protesting. That price is much higher than these inconveniences.
Sounds a lot like the reasoning the military uses when they bomb the wrong village.
Not at all, it is basic decision theory.
I don't know what you call it, but it looks an awful lot like you're saying you're right and if people get hurt it's acceptable, as long as you get what you want.
MORE people get hurt without the protestors. Why don't you look up a general history of what protest has accomplished?
Protests alone accomplish nothing other then raising awareness. Unless the protestors gain the support of people and those people vote in positive changes nothing happens. When you start hurting the people you wish to help you loose support. When you think that protesting alone accomplishes anything you're being foolish.
Civil rights protests didn't get laws changed, voting supporters into office did. Same with the environmental movement. The AARP, the NRA, even the tea party all seem to know this and work to elect people to support their goals. What goals is occupy working toward and which politicians support them?
Your right wing nutty logic is showing. "Protests alone accomplish nothing other then raising awareness." NOT.
What do they actually do?
occupy a country club. and not the common ones, the ones where the 1% are--that's how you hurt them--take away their golf (almost everyone in the 1% is socially obligated to belong to one or more)... examples: Pine Valley in NJ, Aronamink and Merion in Phila, Augusta in GA, Trump in CA, Pebble Beach in CA,,, there are a bunch of them.
This would minimize impact on common worker.
Ms BlueRose, Can we protest in front of your house, and take your computer equipment and car? That's what these occupiers are doing they are taking money from working people.
You suffer from the 1%'s indoctrination.
you are so estupido. What 1% indoctrination are you talking about? The U.S. is not divided into two sections ,1% and 99% ,that is just a drug induced fantasy that you and your nutty occupiers believe.
You have your 1%er-issued blinders on, stereotypical insults and all.
In the case of occupiers and their supports, the stereotypes fit. Sorry, it's just the way it is. Occupiers are below average intelligence.
Can you please show me the statistics for that statement. "Occupiers are below average intelligence." I know you have a link to the study that scientifically proves that statement. You are obviously in the above average intelligence group so I know you have proof of this statement. No? No study? No link to this? This is just more BS rhetoric from someone with extremely "below average intelligence." Wake up. This country is facing collapse and we are here bickering. We better get it together soon or it won't matter what side you're on. The government has passed through the senate a bill in which they can arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely without cause or trial. Where do you think this is heading? It's a rhetorical question.
Mr Anonymous, calm down, its OK. The fact that you think i'm going to supply statistics to my comment that occupiers are stupid (i.e. below average intelligence) just shows that you are stupid. This is a fight, occupiers (you) against normal Americans (me). People get called stupid in a fight,,,stupid.
You are obviously not normal. And you obviously are a child. And I assure you no one is fighting against you. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near you anyway. I fear I would become retarded through osmosis. What? Osmosis? What does it mean? Use a dictionary. Dictionary? It is a big book filled with words and their definitions. Guess I'm not as stupid as you thought. "Boogerface!"
Mr Anonymous, i don't think that retardation is passed on by osmosis, but if you want to believe that, that's OK, work it out with the doctors when you check back in to the clinic.
Verbal dispute with you would be pointless. You are outgunned. Good day sir. I SAID GOOD DAY!
Now that statement tells me quite a lot about YOU. Occupiers are below average intelligence? Not at all!
And i was being polite.
Telling the working class that the money that you're costing them is for their own good is ironic, because that's what the 1% tell them too.
Protests that hurt the working man also hurt the Occupy movement. For example, The Daily, a publication that has been relatively sympathetic to the Occupy movement so far, ran this today about yesterday's disruptions:
So what was the benefit of protesting? If the cost is higher to NOT protest, then what was the benefit from doing the shutdown?
How does it help the Occupy movement for the Occupy movement to become a more immediate and concrete threat to working class Americans than corporate greed?
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Totally; and maybe a shutdown isn't going to bankrupt Goldman Sachs, but no one can tell me companies like Walmart did not feel that this close to the Christmas rush.
It would be nice if more union leaders and truckers joined in to help shut down the ports, but some seem more concerned about a days wages than real long term change. In the end, if they ignore the problem they will eventually lose just as bad as the people they are complaining about.
In spite of the MSMs take It looks like many workers were supportive because they have been screwed for so long, and see things are not getting better; but the MSM has done a terrible job of getting that across. Probably because the prospect of port shutdowns does actually frighten their 1% advertisers.
The issue isn't doing nothing versus protesting. The issue is what you protest, how you do it , who it affects, and whether you clearly communicate the purpose of your protest to the public.
Yes, I agree. All action is not equivalent. Focused, productive action that's aimed at a clear goal is far more valuable than ineffective action with no clear objectives. Protests that affect American workers more than the 1% are counter-productive. Simply acting for the sake of acting can be more harmful than good to the movement.
The economic system is structured so that ANYTHING protesters do to hurt the 1% will hurt the common working person more. That's why the structure works so well.
So, what's an acceptable sacrifice for change? It would be nice to pretend everyone involved in a revolution gets to choose to sacrifice something or not, but that's not possible.
That might have made sense IF yesterday's actions were aimed at gaining some kind of benefit for the sacrifice that they forced some people to make. What did those people sacrifice for? What was the benefit?
You know what? OWS supporters' opinions probably should be read or evaluated a bit the merit. But for those who have been aganst OWS anyway, and I believe there are whole bunch here, let's not waste time to read what they said! Save some energy. They are welcome to go somewhere else. OWS folks will not stop them.
Or, if you care about the level of support from the mainstream, then maybe you should pay attention to constructive criticism. If Monday's actions were not aimed at any specific objective, and they were not (that's the constructive criticism) then they were a protest, which is a PR stunt. An attempt to get attention, draw attention to certain issues, and to sway opinion. My constructive criticism here in this thread, is that since the goal was to influence public opinion (because there was no other goal) the protest failed. Because it didn't articulate any clear message, and most of the media coverage was negative for that reason. With no clear message, it looked to mainstream America like an act of sabotage. A threat to the working class during hard times, right before Christmas.
Manstream? You meant Main$$$tream?? Media whores? I said, go *&%$ themselves! They are scum bags, most of them. Look at the media in Europe, shame on our media! M$M = Unfair & Unbalance = Unamerican. If they are just folks, they would block the OWS news left and right until much later time because they finallu realized oh if the other media get ahead, they lose more time to make profits! They smell $$$, that is all! USA media is a JOKE!!! Unfair and unbalanced. I had it, my friends all had it. You know what, we don't even watch so called main$$$tream anymore!
Correction: if they are just folks, they WOULDN'T block OWS news for so long. They are NO GOOD! Do they really think they care about serving people, us? Hell no, they are serving their own pocket and profits. That's all! So many people, honestly, HAD IT WITH THE NEWS MEDIA!!
That unbalanced rant was kind of amusing considering that I didn't even mention the media at all. You seem to have gone off on a hilarious spree of hyperbole about "media whores" as a knee-jerk reaction to the word "mainstream". Funny stuff. You're really swaying my opinion.
The guy is losing 600 bucks but the corporations are losing much more. Some of the trucker unions agreed to this.
That $600 might be 1% of that guy's earnings for the whole year. The company that owns the port and the airport is so large that the protest might have cost them 0.000000000000001% of their annual revenue. Like Obama says, this is just simple math. Taking money from a rich person hurts them a lot less than taking money from a poor person. When you rationalize forcing that worker to sacrifice more than the company that owns the port and the airport, you kind of seem to be on the same side as the Republicans who oppose taxing the 1%.
Wow! you all digress don't you? What does all of this incivility have to do with the original meaning of the Occupy movement ?
Round here we talk just like lions But we sacrifice like lambs
Have you heard about the term of "Inconvenient Truth"??? Have a little vision, please! We all have the time of sacrificing something in life to gain or protect something we deserve or we own. I had this experience before when negotiating a contract with management to holding on our benefits, not letting them taking away our long fought labor right, benefits and retirement,etc. I did take a day off without pay. During Civil Right movement period, under MLK's leading, black people and their supporters also sacrificed a lot, feared a lot and sustained so much inconvenience to fight for their right. And, don't tell me they did it wrong!!
I'm all for focused sacrifice, but during the civil rights movement, the sacrifices were made willingly, and they were made for a purpose. In Monday's protest, Occupy forced OTHER PEOPLE to sacrifice, not themselves. BIG difference. Occupy also forced other people to sacrifice for no clear reason. With no objective. For no goal. What was the intended benefit that made the cost justified?
Mr, if everything is going so right (if that what you are saying, everything is going perfectly well), well, OWS would never been born. Your position is against OWS anyway, so whatever reason or questions you posed, DON'T COUNT!
BTW, what you said above, really? Reasons are clear to me, also, is NOT ONLY one area goes wrong in this country which we all love. To stop this movement, the government and our so called elected officials, they KNOW WHAT THEY SHOULD DO. At least, STOP THE WRONG DOINGS FIRST!!! Protect ordinary people rather than bend over to the powerful banks, lobbyists and corporates. They KNOW what they should take action now, and please, don't question why the hell people are now on the streets!! Well, thought people have nothing more fun things to do rather than going on the streets? Think about it!
Your assumption that I'm against OWS or that I think that "everything is going perfectly well", because I disagree with Occupy's strategy is incorrect. Have you ever heard of constructive criticism? By your logic, by criticizing the state of the American economy, you're an anti-American, anti-capitalist person. Criticizing something doesn't mean that you're against it.
And is it really true that if somebody isn't with OWS, then their opinion doesn't matter? Are the people who you're trying to convince the people who already agree with you? Are you starting to understand how this constructive criticism thing works yet? Or do you want to waste more time and continue to alienate, by working to position me as your ideological enemy?
this is all about societal disruption. dress rehersal for next years election.
Actually the news reported they hurt Goldman Sachs?
Personally I think sitting pretty and doing nothing at all is worse than what they did! Fact is letting things be the way they are is insane...
I won't dispute that, but how did yesterday's actions make the world a better place? They made the world a worse place for a lot of kids from families who have hundreds less to spend before Christmas than they expected. What was the benefit? If a protest movement wantonly causes collateral damage without apology and without regard for accomplishing anything, then why would anybody support them?
Its a step, thats all it can be, I don't believe for any second that "any" revolution / protest was ever cautiously planned and carried out without flaw!
America and how it came to be... I'm sure the founding fathers, columbus, all of them stumbled and fell made mistakes along that road.
History has a way of rewriting itself!
However as a trucker myself... Occupy at least gives us some sort of a voice... to be honest we dont have much of a voice in the business were walked on in almost every single direction... from pay, to home time, to dispatch, etc... shit comes flying from all directions.
Its not much of a voice, but truckers definitly need "better business" rights and employment rights / pay. Many OTR drivers sacrifice a lot to do what they do. Just to make a living.
On the other spectrum being young, out of work for the moment, with no christmas in sight for my daughter or my family. I pray Occupy makes the changes they want.
For better opportunites, I'm tired of going to an interview with 1 position open and 200 + people applying. Fighting between the guys with diplomas, the seasoned well experienced and the rest.
I'd sacrifice everything to ensure my daughter does not have to endure this life when she gets to be my age
All steps are not equivalent. A step in the wrong direction is even less useful than not taking any step at all. There are a lot of people involved in this movement how are eager to take any step in any direction, without thinking about it first. Yesterday was definitely "a step", but if it had no clear objective then the net result was simply negative publicity for the Occupy movement, and diminished public support. That's the cost of stepping without thinking first.
Funny, the same article also says:
"DeAndre Whitten, 48, an Oakland longshoreman for 12 years, said it was his understanding he would be losing about $500 in pay for the day. But he said he supported the protest effort.
"I'm excited. It was way overdue. I hope they keep it up," Whitten said. "I have no problem with it. But my wife wasn't happy about it.""
So at least 50% of that household won't appreciate what you did for them right before Christmas. But even if the longshoremen were all for it, when did Occupy Wall Street become about labor disputes for longshoremen?
Stop using this "You" category. I wasn't there, just merely pointing out that some people liked it and some people didn't. Our ENTIRE country is run on things that some people like and some people don't. Duh, its called Democracy.
"You" means "the Occupy movement", which would be a little burdensome to type every time. One of the ways that this farce perpetuates itself is that nobody is responsible for any of the decisions. A group of people demanding accountability from Wall Street is structured to avoid responsibility for any of its own actions. My use of the word "you" isn't appropriate because the people orchestrating the masses can hide behind the masses whenever anybody questions their motives or decisions, so there is no "you" to address. So when I say "you", I'm referring to the entire movement and also its supporters, since that's the only entity that it is possible to address. When you post about a longshoreman who really appreciates how the movement cost him $600 two weeks before Christmas, you're putting yourself into that "you" category.
Nope, you're still putting me in that "you" category. You read some kind of assumption from my post. I was merely commenting on the fact that like all things that happen, there is more than one side.
I'm putting you into the "you" category because it's not possible for me to directly address the people who actually orchestrated the port shutdown attempts yesterday. The people who decided to focus Occupy's efforts on that labor dispute are not available to take responsibility for their decisions. They hide behind the mob.
Seriously? Seriously? You two are fighting over using the word you. How much are you two really accomplishing right now. This is incredible. This is exactly the reason people get turned off by OWS. Stop arguing about things that have no bearing on the issues at hand. This shows a real lack of intelligent thought on both your parts. I'm embarrassed.
No, I'm fighting over the word "WHY". I have been totally focused on WHY the Occupy movement is aimed at shutting down shipping ports, and this entire page represents the second full day that I have invested in that question: WHY?
This was the first time that I tried to find answers to that question, after the first shutdown of the Port of Oakland:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/why-shut-down-the-port-in-oakland-for-what-purpose/
The fact that nobody can answer my very focused question is what turns me off on the Occupy movement, personally.
You were arguing over the word "you". Please don't make me copy and paste the argument for you to read. Just scroll up. I am not going to argue with you about this so please don't reply. I will not comment further. Thank you.
Please read downward instead of upward to see the part where we came to a consensus.
You're trying to shift away from that bickering over the word "you", but you don't have anything to say about the word "WHY"?
Yes you can, you can say, "the people who actually orchestrated the port shutdown attempts yesterday," and don't say that is harder, cause you already typed it, so you clearly have the ability.
Maybe the people who are actually orchestrating the west-coast protesters will read this, and my "you" will be appropriate then. But somehow I doubt it, because they don't seem to be driven by anything but their own objectives. Co-opting a bunch of free strikers-for-hire into a labor dispute.
Ah ha! You agree with me :) A job well done.
Seriously? Seriously? You two are fighting over using the word you. How much are you two really accomplishing right now. This is incredible. This is exactly the reason people get turned off by OWS. Stop arguing about things that have no bearing on the issues at hand. This shows a real lack of intelligent thought on both your parts. I'm embarrassed.
You should be embarrassed for copying and pasting your admonition with no regard for the real question: "WHY"
I am. I am truly embarassed. C'mon.
Do you have any input into the conversation at hand, about the intended purpose of shutting down shipping ports?
Do you? I haven't seen anything of yours that's really worth reading. But good day to you sir. I'm busy reading something interesting. I SAID GOOD DAY!
You didn't have to respond so much if you thought it was a stupid conversation. I think that working with people on their ideas, even ideas that are "off-topic" or entirely different than mine is exactly what this movement is about. You are the one wasting time be reading something and commenting negatively upon it. I am embarrassed for you as well, my friend.
XXAnon doesn't like "childish arguments", but rude and vulgar ones are ok with him.
XXAnonymouSXX1 points 1 day ago Oh look its thrashy's groupie. Follow and suck. Follow and suck.
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[-]April1 points 1 day ago Whatever.
http://occupywallst.org/forum/donald-rumsfeld-files-reveal-pre-911-focus-on-iraq/#comment-500170
Hehe, some people are so strange :)
Thats fine. I am a huge supporter of this movement and I find childish arguments off putting. Say what you will but I am free to comment on anything I choose. I think for myself. I don't let others do it for me. Thank you for your concern. And I'm sure I will lose some sleep tonight over your embarassment of me.
Hahaha, so ironic and backwards! You are free to comment as I am free to comment. However, you must see that your comments are as off-putting as the original conversation. Don't fret! You're just like the rest of us :)
Did those truck drivers know that an action was planned for those ports? I sure think they would have. Could they have taken personal time off? Perhaps. Perhaps they don't have any such benefit. If that's the case then they've got more problems than a 1 day occuption has caused them. ~ Thunderclap
Two days. This was the second shutdown of the Port of Oakland.
If a bunch of protesters outside of your job cost you two days' wages weeks before Christmas, do you think that you would be inclined to support those protesters and their cause? Now how about if they don't even have a cause, and they just protest simply to cause a disruption for you, for your own good? Would that impress you?
I take your point, TechJunkie.
In a better world the only ones affected by actions taken Occupiers would be the mega-corporations themselves, not those who work for them (directly or indirectly). While regretable, we both know that isn't possible.
I read the drivers' open letter posted here on this forum. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they claim to have lost $600 each? If they were reimbursed for their losses would that impress you?
No. What would impress me is if the Occupy protesters would think before they acted. If they cause collateral damage for no clear purpose and their victims are made whole by an insurance policy, then that doesn't address the original problem -- that Occupy is a mob that is willing to create disruptions without first thinking about what they intend to gain from it, or how.
I respectfully disagree with your contention that Occupy is a mob and doesn't first think about the intended gain. I believe the horizontal organizational schematic has great merit for continuing the long-term viability of the movement. I suppose we'll have to see how it plays out. Enjoy the rest of your day! ~ Thunderclap
I think that we are seeing how it's playing out, and yesterday's protest was all negative with no benefit. But thank you for your kindness, and I hope that you enjoy the rest of your day as well.
4 'O.W.S.', U - tj = "all negative with no benefit" ! QED~{;-)
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They were probably scabs.
You put the Emma into Goldman!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman
I'm sure the revolutionary war was a huge inconvenience to Britain too. Ending slavery was a big inconvenience to plantation owners....
Enough is enough. This ends now.
like the historical context. folks need to focus what does the 1% engage in? private jets (occupy teterboro airport runway in NJ), country clubs, private clubs, the richest of them are residents of monaco, have swiss or lichtenstein accounts, work with wealth managers who only handle ultra high-net worth clients, get a list of their hedge funds and go there etc...
I'm also sure that the revolutionary war and the civil war that ended slavery inconvenienced poor people and slaves, many of whom probably wanted no part in any of it. Life is a beach. Glad we ended slavery even if it inconvenienced some slaves.
How does that justify a protest that only hurts a bunch of workers, not the company that owns the port and the airport? Not Goldman Sachs?
The revolution, ending slavery, hurt the colonists and the plantation owners. What's your point?
There will always be winners and losers to any action. Including class warfare. Blocking the ports has very little effect comparatively for the common person even if you work at them. The media is incorrectly reporting lost wages when last I heard the union members were paid.
I'm simply at a loss to see how you think you're hurting the 1%. You act as though the companies who own these shipping lines, the trucking companies, the port owners, whoever, are actually thinking, feeling entities capable of being guilt-ridden or forced into compliance with your demands. They are run by individuals are already very rich, who won't be affected in any significant way by these shutdowns. These individuals are answerable in most cases to their shareholders. The shareholders want profits. The individuals will make decisions to keep profits going. They'll start by laying off workers and hiring PR firms to blame it on you, which will resonate because you will start hurting more and more ordinary people as you go along who won't give a rat's ass about you telling them that it's a minor inconvenience in the cause of a revolution. They will join the already large majority who is anti-Occupy and pressure will build to wipe the floor with the protesters and get people their jobs back. If you somehow are able to withstand that, the companies cut their losses and either close up shop or sell at a price to another company who will have a lower cost basis and be able (temporarily) to pay the ransom demanded by the protesters and still do business. The owners? They couldn't care less one way or the other. You think they're afraid of being fired? Nothing you do is going to affect them much personally, so they really don't care. Companies just react to situations and do what is best to affect the best possible monetary outcome, whether it be negotiate with unions, fight them, close plants, hire workers, whatever. They think these things through pretty well, they plan for contingencies, they have lawyers for litigating, they can move money around and fight these kinds of actions for years. They've got plans for moving freight from different locations, by different modes, just in case this kind of thing happens. They'll just stop paying their union contracts, citing some kind of illegal work stoppage clause, and go to court, and drag it out, and maybe settle it once you've gone away. It's a cost of doing business for them, one that's already factored into their business plan.
Re. being "simply at a loss to see how you think you're hurting the 1%.", please see below :
a) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/12/12/bloomberg_articlesLW4C5V6K50XT.DTL ;
b) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-12/goldman-sachs-top-target-of-occupy-protests-at-west-coast-ports.html ;
c) http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-12-12/goldman-sachs-target-of-occupy-protests-at-west-coast-ports.html ;
d) http://preview.tinyurl.com/brotsbe &
e) http://tinyurl.com/6n5whdg .
I've read your monolithic block of text and words & phrases such as "defeatist" ; "negativist" ; "pro-status-quo conservative" ; "intending to demoralise" ; "quiescence advocating" and others, came to mind. I'd have put "dis-info agent" & "psy-operative" in the mix too - if you knew the first thing about "paragraphing" ;-)
Click the links ; see what The "Business Media" (a-d) says & iViva Los Indignados!
per aspera ad astra ...~~~*
Rather than these phrases, just say, "Leave me alone, just let me live in my dreamworld". Much shorter. I feel for you, buddy. Good luck, you're going to need it.
Readers will note your inability or unwillingness to address the evidence presented. Did you even click one of these links ? Me thinx NOT !
Constructing your own faux argument and then proceeding to knock it down indicates a closed-mind ; hardened heart and limited thinking. Don't lie - you've never felt for anyone else in all your born days !!
Keep drinking the MSM Kool-Aid !!!
SOLIDARITY (to others and you tho' alas, you'll have no grasp of the beautiful meaning of the word!)
I read the bloomberg one. It was exactly the type of article I was expecting. You still haven't told me what you expect to do to Goldman Sachs. I feel for all the drivers who want to deliver their load and get the hell home to their families at the end of the day. You couldn't give a shit. You're into the "revolucion", as you'd say in your native dialect.
Bet that'd you'd love to believe that I was an 'illegal working illegally' in The "Oh, So Legal" U$A, wouldn't you ?! As we're wasting each others time here (cf "join the Tea Party" above!), I'll leave you to your confusion and quandaries ... y hasta luego amigo ;-)
Well thank you for this exhaustive dissertation, but a military police state, which we are now in; isn't receptive or respectful of the prudent measures you have so bountifully proposed and listed. Until at least 50 to 100 million Americans get in this fight, including police and miltary...it's game over...welcome and embrace feudalism/fascism/corporatism/Nazism/ serfdom
We are not in a military police state. Do you see armed men at intersections? People with assault rifles at airports? We need to do it by getting people who normally can't stand each other to work together on a common set of goals which identify the root cause of the problem as we see it. Money and the influence it buys. That's it. Stop that. Make it the #1 and only issue in the next congressional elections. Get promises to immediately propose and pass some or all of the items I listed immediately upon taking office, or they will be recalled or voted out at the earliest opportunity. Get on board some former congressmen or senators who know the game and ask them exactly how to go about it. One major thing is to keep the list limited, effective at getting at the problem, and capable of ensuring as broad support as possible. Then, appeal for funding. If you had even 50 million people give $10-$100, you're looking at an average of about $2.5 billion dollars, enough to make a dent I'd say in affecting change. You get distracted by side issues, social issues, and all of the class warfare stuff, you're going down. Get the government back to the people, then we can fight about the rest.
Well we're certainly NOT under a constitutional republic anymore with a functioning constitution and Bill of Rights. Have you researched SB 1867 The National Defense Authorization Act ?
There's a signifcant disconnect from reality here, though endearing.
Well, I just read section 1031-1033 of this bill and I'm sorry, but I don't see in it what you seem to be saying. It actually has a couple of paragraphs which state that "nothing in this section limits or expands the president's power under the existing Act", and "nothing in this section is construed to affecting existing U.S. law with respect to detainment of U.S. citizens". It goes on to describe "covered persons", which are the people who committed 9-11, those that harbor them, those who Al-Qaeda, those involved in acts of war against the U.S.", etc. It does mention the ability of the secretary of defense, state department, etc. to reques a waiver of some sort for national security purposes that have to be clearly defined and reported to Congress, along with the organizations and names of individuals who are then considered "covered persons". Maybe it's inthere somewhere else. It doesn't have quite the hyperbolic, blanket authorization that opposers of the bill would indicate.
There are two versions; which version are you reading from ?
Congress Enacts Indefinite Detention Law For U.S. Citizens! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJQUxUmQ28o
Rand Paul responds to John McCain S. 1867 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QktGAtHLt2Q&feature=related
The latest one. The language is being stretched by liberals to include their fantasy theories. The President himself is going to have to name the supposed terrorists. I can't really see a president detaining a bunch of Occupy protesters unless they are truly doing something terroristic like bombing buildings. The covered persons are clearly intended as Al Qaeda, Taliban, and those that support them. yes, it also mentions those that are at war with the U.S., but I would think that if an action that was done today could be construed as an act of war against the U.S., that the president would already have already declared the person who committed that act an enemy of the state. In my opinion, they are thinking ahead in terms of actions that are sudden and cause mass confusion and hysteria, like buildings being blown up, trains being derailed, chemical or dirty bomb attacks, that sort of thing. They want the ability to be able to stop things as quickly as possible, detain people if necessary, and sort it out as quickly as possible, but put a stop to it and have the tools necessary to prevent things from happening in the first place. I am not a Paul fan, who prefers the standard police routine where we wait until a city has been destroyed and then really get mad and upset and start blaming the politicians and police for not protecting us from it happening, talking about how they had all sorts of clues to it happening and they didn't do anything. I for one do not mind them being proactive. We're so far from a real police state it isn't even funny, but you wouldn't know it by all the nervous ninnies on here worried about giving up their precious civil liberties (they haven't given up any that I know of)
What will be your thoughts when you see charges of terrorism being applied to criminality in an "unanticipated " use of the term terrorism. So you're not concerned about the suspension of the constitution and Bill of Rights being codified ?
http://uniset.ca/terr/news/wp_antiterr_nygangs.html
N.Y. Using Terrorism Law To Prosecute Street Gang Critics Say Post-9/11 Legislation Is Being Applied Too Broadly
By Michelle Garcia Special to The Washington Post Tuesday, February 1, 2005; Page A03
NEW YORK
The newest face of an alleged terrorist wears a goatee, stands about five feet tall, dresses in baggy clothes and resides in the Bronx. Gang member Edgar Morales, aka "Puebla," has the distinction of becoming one of the first people ever charged under New York's state terrorism laws.
The Bronx district attorney has accused members of the St. James Boys street gang of shootings "committed with the intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population." The other charges include murder, attempted murder, various weapons charges and assault. But prosecutors have not alleged that the gang is connected to any terrorist network.
First of all, I don't think the new legislation gives a district attorney the ability to classify someone as a terrorist or say they are at war with the U.S. I think there should be some pretty narrowly defined boundaries for "terrorism". I don't believe the term "committed with the intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population" is in the legislation being passed. It talks about war against the U.S. Now, I suppose criminal organizations such as drug cartels' activities could get to a point that they pose a threat to the security of the population of the U.S. and thus could be declared as conducting a "war" against the U.S by the president and then power given to police to detain them. I think any president will be careful in analyzing the specific threat and if it is a local nuisance or a national crisis. I see the point, and I believe there would probably be some innocent people get swept up in any detentions that might arise, but I believe the authorities will still do everything they can to make sure they have the right people and if they don't have any evidence, they'll let them go. But a potential tool that would strike fear into the hearts of real criminals, people who have long records, people who everyone in the community knows are bad people and are threatening and terrrozing people, intimidating people into silence, that I wouldn't mind at all. I'm a pretty old school behavior modification guy. I think you give people a few chances to modify their behavior and you gradually drop the hammer on them with each successive punishment.
You're going to go into shock at what is headed our way...or rather here. I guess that's why history keeps repeating; because human beings want to believe, what is most comforting to them...only to awake to the fact, that their belief was entirely wrong...then history repeats for the millionth time lol
Okay...so what is plan B...because a coup d'etat has occured in America. What's the plan ?
Indefinite Detention FRAUD by SB 1867 (NDAA) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBd3mvT1nzg
Organize, hold your noses, and join with the Tea Party. Get money out of politics, demand term limits, end revolving door governing/lobbying, end bailouts of any kind, enact law to keep Wall St. from being able to bring America to its knees, keep strict lending standards for people and businesses. Money flowing through the halls of Congress is what is wrong with America. Capitalism isn't the problem, outrageous salaries aren't the problem. Fix all the rigged special deals and loopholes for various industries (except for one that encourages American manufacturing of any kind), tell China to fuck off, don't keep trying to drive american business out of state or offshore. Face it, we've got lots of people who need work and who are not terribly educated. We can either hope to send them all to school and hope they'll become engineers or we can reopen all the closed manufacturing plants in America and quickly get them back to work making something, but that will take a huge push from the government to help America's companies be able to compete. I personally would tie a company's taxes to both the number of permanent employees and their average wages, on a sliding scale. We've got to get aggressive in turning around the country. Shutting down businesses, fighting eternally with the 1% is not going to cut it. They have too many options and they don't care. You'd have to literally turn yourself into something you don't want to be to defeat them. You'd have to enact all sorts of gestapo confiscation laws and make things illegal which have always been legal. Long before those laws ever get passes, the money will disappear electronically to a safe country near you. The idea is not to go down that road at all. It may seem counterintuitive, but sometimes to stop fighting, you just have to stop fighting. Go back to square one, figure out what the other guy wants, and see if you can give it to him. For instance, with all the vitriol of taxing the rich and our debt, you can just say, "OK, let's tax the 1% at 50% of their earnings". That gets you something approaching $200 billion a year in extra revenue. You want half the military budget? OK. That's another $400 billion a year. Now where's the other $900 billion going to come from to balance our ANNUAL budget? It's an easy exercise, gives the other guy pretty much everything it wants, and clearly demonstrates that spending is our problem, not revenues, unless of course, everyone else wants to pony up next taxes as well as the 1%. I think businesses and their employees/unions, should share information as much as possible. yes, the owners of companies want to make a large return on their investment because they are risking losing it all potentially. So, you factor in a large profit for them. Then make sure you can factor in the pay that you want and all of the other costs of the business and see if the price that you can sell your product or service for still makes sense. It should be fairly simple, but greed gets in the way.
"Union officials say longshoremen were not paid after Occupy Oakland protesters blockaded the port Nov. 2."
http://abclocal.go.com/kfsn/story?section=news/state&id=8462240
Congratulations on costing thousands of workers hundreds of dollars each right before Christmas. All in the name of a vague and nebulous extremist ideology, with no clear objective.
I will give up a weeks worth of pay to get 100,000 people shutting down my city. Hell I'll give up a months worth of pay. The bigger picture is what matters. Stop living in the moment.
What would the objective be, in shutting down your city? How would that help anybody? You think that it would be cool to create a disruption for the sake of creating a disruption?
The civil rights protesters employed civil disobedience for a purpose. If they shut down something, then it was to create leverage to gain something. There was always a purpose, they weren't simply trying to sabotage society. If the Occupy movement has no purpose, but yet aims to create disturbances for the sake of creating disturbances, then they're not protesting, they're sabotaging. If there is no point to it, then it's anarchy, not a protest.
cause enough problems for the wealthy and they will do one of two things. assert their authority through the police and military, or realize that they cannot hoard the wealth for themselves.
the first option is vastly more likely.
Yes, if a hundred thousand people took to the streets to sabotage a city then the city would defend itself, and that means law enforcement. That many people would overwhelm any city's law enforcement capabilities and they would beg for help, and that means military. You haven't really explained why you think any of that would be a good thing? What are all of these disturbances and clashes with law enforcement supposed to accomplish?
Do the Occupy protesters really think that 99% of Americans want protesters to create disturbances and clash with law enforcement in their name? When Occupy protesters shut down infrastructure, do you think that most people reading in the newspaper are cheering them on? Or do they see a potential threat?
I read a news article today about the Occupy movement that had a poll question, "Do you support Occupy Wall Street?". The response on that poll right now is 82% "No".
You are a Quiescence Advocating, Conservative, Right-Wing Reactionary so ...
$TOP trying to fool yourself (coz you're certainly NOT fooling anyone else here!) that you really and truly have the slightest concern for the "thousands of workers". You and your whole "concerned schtick" are about as genuine as a 9 Dollar Note !!
Reactionary Fraud ...
I knew that was coming sooner or later. To an extremist, anybody who doesn't agree with their ideology is an enemy. Al Qaeda, the John Birch Society and Occupy Wall Street all share the same us-versus-them mentality.
I originally came here as a potential supporter, but the total disregard for focusing on clear objectives, combined with the unapologetic infliction of collateral damage, has left me very disappointed in the movement. That's very different from being a right-winger, but I don't expect an extremist to be able to see the difference, because an extremist only sees us, and them. Nothing in between. That's you, buddy. I knew that at least one guy like you was lurking somewhere, eager to call me a Fox-News-watching conservative. Extremists like you with world views like that are a big part of why I can't support this movement.
You're the one who has mentioned "enemy" and (Lame) FUX SNEWzzz here il0l! !!!
If you think that I'm an "extremist" then I wish that I could introduce you to some of my friends, lol ... but on second thoughts, I'd like to think that I'd spare Them The Indignity as nothing you say in your post above can really be believed !!
Your construction of 'strawman" arguments in order to justify "a big part of why (you) can't support this movement." are weak and lack integrity. You (Right) and I (Left) are not destined to get on (to say the least) and I'll leave it to Passionate or Dispassionate readers to sort 'the wheat from the chaff' "in between" us !
Good Luck with your genuflecting to those with more money than you and hope that They admit you to Their "Cult of Wealth" before your time's up et ...
momento mori ;-(
When slaves decided to escape from the plantation system, guided by Harriet Tubman; they endanged and inconvenienced the slaves who decided to remain on the plantation; who became suspect as collaborators, and had to shoulder the additional work load left by those who abandoned their slave post. What right did Tubman, and the escaping slaves, have to endanger, and inconvenience those who remained, who had families, who also relied on them ? What right did Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto have to fight back and resist their extermination, no doubt causing other non-involved Jews to be suspect and killed; and is it possible to engage in a pain free struggle for economic and social justice, where the 99% who actually sustain and staff the plantation system, and third reich, are not negatively impacted, or inconvenienced ?
Mr Vega and others see themselves as separate and distinct from the struggle, and have little understanding as to their role in keeping an unjustice system functioning;nor can he pass onto his children, a legacy of freedom; because he, you and all of us, keep the tyrannical machine oiled and functioning.
Let's see Mr Vega and family cope wih the advancing military police state if the spirit and mission of OWS is defeated. He's going to lose more than $600., but his children will absolutely gain the status of serfs.
You cost Mr Vega $600 right before Christmas. I'm sure that his children will understand, since that's where the money probably would have gone. Congratulations for looking out for the American worker.
I think there is alot more at stake here than christmas. I feel for Vega and others like him, but every change has a price--and historically that price is shouldered by the working class. If the price is a less than fantastic christmas, then the revolution is doing pretty well by most standards.
However, if you happen to have an alternative to the historical precedent--which is entirely possible--I'm sure that OWS (and everyone in the 99%) would be more than happy to listen and experiment with your ideas.
Okay, so what was the objective? Your idealism is so important that it justifies forcing Mr Vega to make sacrifices before Christmas -- FOR WHAT?? What was the benefit from yesterday's actions? The Occupy movement forced other people to make sacrifices in the name of its ideology, and it doesn't seem to concern any of the people involved that nobody bothered to first think about the intended benefit of this forced sacrifice.
So what should they do instead? Nothing?
People are tired of waiting for "markets to clear." They want to get on the streets and do SOMETHING about it. They can't all go to DC and protest @ Congress. Their votes don't really matter thanks to our electoral college and the mass of party-line voters that have not yet woken up. "Voting with your dollars" is a feel-good phrase, but it won't make any sort of dent on 1%'s profits. How else do they stop the 1%?
Doing nothing is preferable to counter-productive action. Should Occupy protesters block all of the bridges and tunnels to New York City and shut down the whole island, just to "do something"? Some people have suggested just that. But civil disobedience with no clear objective or message is just sabotage. Shutting things down just for the sake of shutting things down makes Occupy seem to be an unruly mob of hooligans. A problem, rather than a solution.
I still haven't heard of a better solution from you. Are you going to just complain or offer an alternative that would actually have an effect?
You and I do not necessarily agree about what the most-urgent problems are. You think that the electoral college is a bigger problem than a vast, amorphous protest group transforming into a sabotaging, domestic terrorist organization. I don't.
High-level, strategic thinking is what is lacking in the movement. As April pointed out yesterday, Martin Luther King described four basic steps in direct action. The first involved high-level thinking. The next two were about optimizing the effectiveness of the action. The FOURTH and LAST step in direct action is the actual action. The Occupy movement skipped the first three steps, which results in unproductive, or counter-productive, action.
Acting without first thinking is useless. If this movement supposedly is taking a cue from the civil rights protests, as many Occupiers believe it is, then the movement needs to actually learn something from the civil rights protestors. THINK before acting.
"vast, amorphous protest group transforming into a sabotaging, domestic terrorist organization"
Really? I don't see anyone picking up AKs and planting IEDs anytime soon. That prediction is absurd.
I agree that it would be nice to have more focused strategy. Right now everyone has their own agenda to promote, and it seems that actions are based on the needs of the local occupations with an overarching emphasis on inequality. Over on the west coast there seems to be some labor issues caused by the 1%. Over in my neck-of-the-woods Duke Energy is about to raise rates AGAIN. The protests may be different, but the message is the same: We are tired of being screwed by the 1%, and we demand a more equal economy.
So do you want to see everyone focus on just one thing? What is your exact plan? Lay it all out, or better yet, lay it all out at a GA. If you want the high-level, strategic thinking, why haven't you proposed it at a GA yet?
What's the difference between shutting down a shipping port with no clear objective, and domestic terrorism? Is there a difference? Shutting down a port to gain leverage in a negotiation is a protest. Shutting down a port to send a clear message is a protest. Shutting down a port for no clear reason is -- what? Domestic terrorism.
And why would I attend a GA? I've spent two full days focused on this simple question: WHY. If there is no clear answer, then I could never support Occupy, so why would I attend a GA?
We have different views on terrorism. Terrorism to me means that citizens are being killed. This is a protest. When someone gets shot let me know.
Why not attend a GA? If you want this movement to change, put your feet where your mouth is and DO SOMETHING about it. Complaining on the internet isn't going to change jack.
I know that there is no point in complaining, I'm just here to form an educated opinion. I want to know whether or not people associated with the Occupy movement even care about the question, "why". The answer to that greatly affects how I view the Occupy movement, and whether or not I would ever support it or participate in it. The answer to that question, whether the Occupy movement in general even cares about strategy or objectives, has been pretty much answered. And the result is that I doubt that I would ever attend a GA. It would be a total waste of time, even assuming that I were sympathetic to the overall concerns of the Occupy movement. Skipping the strategic thinking about objectives and going directly to direct action will not result in success. Participating in a movement that doesn't understand this, for any reason other than entertainment, would also be a waste of time.
No it wouldn't. This movement needs more people like you to join and steer it to focus. If you want a "why" make your "why" heard. You will be met with 100 other "whys" and then you will see why it is hard for the group as a whole to come out with a "why."
Personally, I'm joining the 99percentdeclaration, because I do not believe that the protests alone are going to make a huge difference. This isn't my first rodeo, and I know from experience that people are set in their ways, come hell or high water if they are going to change. The real change happens in the legislatures and the courts: http://www.the99declaration.org
Voting with your dollars will most assuredly make a dent in the pocket of the profits of the 1%. In Indiana, the major water companies released a statement noting that they are making less profit than in previous years because people are being more conservative with their water usage. Voting with our dollar is a lot more important than many people think.
Collectively, yes. As an individual, my $ will not affect anybody's bottom-line in a significant manner.
If we could get 1 million people to boycott something, then we could make a difference.
Yes, but 1 million starts with 1. If no one starts the boycott, or no one lives according to socially responsible purchasing, than nothing will change. It must grow to a collective, yes. But it must first start with an individual.
True.
We'll supposedly Occupy has a lot of funds right now? If I'm not mistaken! what if they vote to give personal checks to those inconvenienced at the port?
Doubt it would happen! But, you never know!
Either way this needed to happen... if your okay with the nation putting us into debt.
Throwing a lot of the nations youth under the bus.
Putting your childrens and your grand childrens futures at risk!
Then trust me... I can say this if a lousy $600 per person was ripped from those at the ports. For the sake of my kids future and future generations!
It was every dime and nickel!
I'd give mine up just as easily $600 dollars is nothing compared to the suffering many of us are now bearing.
Asking people to give up hundreds of dollars in lost wages (right before Christmas) might be justifiable if there were some clear objective. Was there? What did these workers pay for? What was the benefit of yesterday's action? It was the second shutdown of the Port of Oakland over a labor dispute that has nothing to do with Wall Street. Did it advance Occupy's interests? Did the second shutdown finally accomplish something in that labor dispute? Apparently yesterday's actions accomplished neither. What they did accomplish was causing a lot of people in the mainstream, like myself, to question what it was all for.
Progress is always slow, honestly we could talk about this for ages, Rome was built a day! The American revolution didnt happen with the snap of someones fingers.
For those who are on the outside, maybe its just a wake up call... To use your voice, to say enough is enough, to at least stand up instead of sit down...
If you havent watched the militarized police strikes against Occupy I can tell you... this the horror itself on to what power certain people have is scary.
A constitutional amendment is being trampled on, silenced, bad publicity. Did you read about the mayors of each city "conveniently having a meeting to discuss occupy"?
Have you seen how strategically one city at a time given a couple days is being evicted by what looks to be a militarized police force?
Do you have any insight at exactly what is going on?
They are literally trying to silence Occupy, to quiet what they do not want to hear!
What happens when they want to silence you would you really take that?
Also conveniently a bill is in police for Internet "censorship" per government for America.
Do you not think part of that is to shut down these sites:?
Mr Vega and all of us who keep the status quo going; have cost trillions and millions of lives. Mr Vega needs to walk in the shoes of the parents whose children were attacked by NATO bombs; led by America. We did this...do you get that ? The American worker staffs and supplies the fourth reich.
Obama's War Incited by CNN, Al Jazeera & Co Leaves Thousands of Libyan Children Handicapped or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhtk950O-OU&skipcontrinter=1
So you're blaming a truck driver in Oakland for American aggression, and you think that you're somehow making the world a better place by costing him $600 right before Christmas? Isn't that a little similar to Al Qaeda's idea that any American is a valid target in their ideological battle?
Al Qaeda is a CIA asset, working for the Anglo American empire; and yes to varying degrees we're all to blame; especially the 99% who in obeying orders keep the fouth reich staffed and operational.
I'm unwilling to continue this discussion because it's really narcissism and indoctrination, that is defining your position, and there is no readily available cure for that....except the rigors of life. Perhaps Jesse Ventura can open your eyes though I wouldn't bet on it. I'm done.
Indefinite Detention FRAUD by SB 1867 (NDAA) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBd3mvT1nzg
"Al Qaeda is a CIA asset". That was definitely the perfect ending to this branch of this conversation. Congratulations for making yourself into a caricature.
http://polidics.com/cia/top-ranking-cia-operatives-admit-al-qaeda-is-a-complete-fabrication.html
http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Al-Qaeda-is-a-CIA-asset-and-a-term-that-translates-into-The-Database
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/fakealqaeda.php
http://911review.org/Alex/Philippine_911_CIA.html
http://www.uaff.us/alqaedatruth.htm
Haha, nice, you fit right in with this cult: http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com
I suppose I should have expected something like that to come out of any conversation about any topic on this site.
Actually I have nothing to do with zeitgeist, nor am I interested in it, nor did I mention it...you did. Notice how you entered into a mental and emotional state of denial, avoidance, deceit and diversion, ignoring the very links to information that would challenge your belief system...some from insiders.
This indicates that your prime motive is to maintain the staus quo, because things are good for you; you're not a truth seeker at all, on any level; and had you lived in the third reich, you would be identified and supportive of the status quo there as well.
You conceal what you are about on the deepest levels with a pretense of concern for Mr Vega, when it is ONLY your position that interests you; narcissists are boring, even when they're using stealth and camouflage. You revere your lies, and disinfo. You're not ready for truth, so I'll move on.
"You're not ready for truth."
Classic. Thank you.
How many agents are working this board trying to embed the association of OWS with anarchist...extremist...extremist language; Christmas; anarchist...extremist...extremist language, anarchist...extremist...extremist language. How many are on this site ?
Still can't face the information in those links....not exactly brave are you ? You'd make a good disinfo op and psyop agent though.
You didn't look at those links, because you're not here for that. You're here to embed the association of extremism with OWS; in the public mind; implementing the next step to teach the public that all protests that oppose the present order are extremist, and enemy belligerants...willing to "hurt" them during sacred holidays. This is your assignment....you're pretty good too...with the psyops.
Wow a 9/11 truther went nuts and replied to one of my posts three times with crackpot accusations that I'm a "psyops" agent. That was really entertaining, and it was also pretty much expected on this web site.
Yes you're using psyop/disinfo techniques against us. Let's expose them.
Psyop: you state: 911truther went nuts: This is the psyop where 911 truth is portrayed as insane by the corprate media; and it's agents. Notice I said nothing about 911 here; but you are in fact using psyops; where you trivialize and build a case of insanity; a tactic utilized by corporate media...as seen below; while creating a divide and conquer, within OWS.
Lawrence O'Donnell, 9-11 Truther Goes Crazy On Air - YouTube Liberal 9/11 Truther Kook Goes Absolutely Nuts! - YouTube Batshit crazy 9/11 truther screams into bullhorn... - YouTube Cindy Sheehan goes 'Full Retard' as a 9/11 Truther | THE BUSTED ... Ron Lawl Goes Full Metal Truther Mental illness and the 9/11 Truther movement... [Archive] - JREF Forum Pentagon Shooter John Patrick Bedell 9/11 Truther–UPDATED: And
Psyop Techniques. ...first apply a label that creates a barrier; a divide, as in 911 truther. This creates suspicion and mistrust. ...second, align the label you have applied, with insanity, and instability. this destroys credibility. ...third, trivialize the concern, or observation, as entertainment, which minimizes it, and diverts attention.
And what about the rest of the people in the country that will see higher prices at the store for groceries and other needed goods because of this strike? When you shut down shipping ports it affects us all, i.e. supply and demand.
We must make sacrifices in life to achieve anything that is good. Evil and apathy always take the path of least resistance. If everything good came easy, then we wouldn't be in the mess we're in today. If you truly care about this country, social justice and humanity, you will be glad to make the sacrifices necessary. If everyone maintains a Walmart mentality of cheap, easy quick fixes, then nothing will change for the better and in fact, you will be contributing to the further demise of your country. You do realize that other people throughout history sacrificed a heck of a lot more than higher prices for you to have the choices and freedoms and luxuries that you do today? To oppose the current movement simply because you can't sacrifice by reducing your consumerism a bit, is a slap in the face to all who have fought righteously for your freedoms.
I work 2 jobs my wife puts in 40+hours to get where we are financially. It's not like were in debt as of 4 years ago we dissolved our credit cards and made their final payments, We live in a nice home(will be paid off in 2 years) because we worked for it! No handouts, social programs or freebies. I get laid off or downsized i move to another job learn new skills, cut our costs to the minimum and push forward for my future and the future of my family. We are as self sufficient as we can be at this point. We hunt game and have a few head of cattle and a garden which we can foods from. How many of you can say the same? The only luxuries i assume you are speaking of is my 12 year old non plasma television or maybe my super slow internet... We have 3 children, all boys. Our choice to have and we love them very much! Education costs continue to climb as does food, clothes, shoes, healthcare, dental costs, school supplies etc and so forth . So by attempting to "hurt" the rich you are just sending their financial pinch down the line to everyone else, they wont feel it they are rich and trust me they plan on staying that way. Obama appointed these wall street moguls to their positions in the government, how about occupying him and them for a change The OWS movement is not an appointed organization by the majority of the U.S. population so stop acting like you are!
"Education costs continue to climb as does food, clothes, shoes, healthcare, dental costs, school supplies etc and so forth." As you pointed out prices are going up anyways. Exactly why are prices going up in this turmoil? Do you think in these economic times there is more demand? It seems like the rich people that are raising your prices and that you are defending so hard don't care about you anyways. Just an observation.
Exactly.. That's an excellent point and one very worthy of noting because it illustrates how much of economy is based on unethical and unfair speculation designed to serve corps during lean times. The media reports statistics that are so truly skewed that most economists can't even make heads or tails of them. It's truly amazing how consumers are so manipulated by government and media....everything from subliminal advertising to fear. Regan's trickle down theory failed and instead trickled up. :(
Actually, I live pretty much the same as you except I don't have any cattle. I have a few chickens for eggs and I grow and can most of my food. My TV is even 18 years old. hahahaha Works fine though and God help me when I need to buy a new one that only lasts for 5 years, if that. That's the problem though...the value of our dollar is so poor...we pay more for everything and get nothing of value in return whether it's medical care, education, material goods and the corps are paying pennies on the dollar for the inferior goods and services we must pay for. No one wants to hurt the rich. We just want fair business practices, no gouging, no unfair speculations, no unfair credit practices, etc..The problem is that the rich got rich by screwing the American consumer and by doing it in such a manner that we were forced to comply.
"to achieve anything that is good" Could you please expand on that? How did costing American workers wages yesterday, and adding costs to goods that Americans will have to pay for, 'achieve something good'?
That's the question that I keep asking, and nobody has an answer: What are these port shutdowns supposed to accomplish? WHY? What is the benefit that justifies the cost?
If you can't clearly express some kind of plan, some kind of intended benefit, then you look a lot like an unruly, disorganized mob of hypocrites, who harm Americans in the name of helping Americans, simply to perpetuate your 'movement'. Disruption for the sake of disruption. Protesting for the sake of protesting. That makes you start to seem like a threat to the American worker, rather than you being on their side.
It's unfortunate that anyone must suffer the consequences of civil dissent but there is no way around that and never has been in the course of history. There are always consequences for everything- good or bad. Americans have tolerated so much unethical behavior in this country for far too long. Tolerance of unethical business practice coupled with the gluttonous consumerism that supports and promotes unfair labor practices, child slavery from cheap imported goods, low wages for American workers, diminishing worker benefits, overpriced poor medical care, etc... have resulted in necessary backlash from Americans who are willing to stand up against the status quo. Do you remember the Boston Tea Party in 1773? The OWSers didn't dump the cargo into the harbor but they were there for many of the same reasons ( and more) as the colonists.
I wasn't at any of the harbors yesterday so I don't know specifically what issues were brought to light by the protesters.
No issues were brought to light. That's what I've been pointing out. They created a disruption. That's all. They acted without thinking first. Or more accurately, they allowed other people to think for them, and they were manipulated into being pawns in a labor dispute that has nothing to do with Wall Street.
But, didn't they demonstrate an interruption in the delivery of imports? It's those imports that destroyed our economic viability. The message was sent across America through demonstration. Maybe that's the problem...not all Americans understand the negative consequences of our current trade agreements.
It's a lot easier for Americans to understand the threat from an unruly mob aimed at disruption for its own sake, than to understand an abstract threat like your protectionist concern. Occupy is itself becoming a more tangible and immediate threat than abstractions like corporate greed.
Yep, you're right. Except that corporate greed, ' free' trade agreements, losing our sovereignty, etc... are not abstract issues..they are just easier to ignore since noticing a ' mob' only requires eyesight, not insight. I just wish that more Americans would educate themselves on the issues plaguing our country but I guess it's difficult to find time to research topics between Tweets and Facebook chatter. Tech, I have friends in other countries ( I have lived overseas as well) who have been telling me since about '03 that we would be in the state we are in today and that they would never live here. Many told me to leave. They also think that we are idiots for tolerating what we do and have been. It's sad and humiliating to hear them speak about my country that way. Sometimes I get defensive but in my heart I always know they are right. A friend of mine came here last summer from Australia and it was really quite interesting to hear his perception of our country. Not only did he notice that we serve enormous portions of unhealthy food but he also got scammed in a HUGE way by Hertz. I warned him about how a lot of companies will ' accidentally' double charge your CC in order to inflate their income and stock but he could not imagine how a company could do that and get away with it. He believes me now! They double charged his CC for over 3,000 American dollars. Hertz said that they would refund his money within 30 days after spending two entire days calling them and attempting to get his credit refund ( while on his vacation). If that wasn't bad enough, by the time he got back to Australia, his money was worth less than the American dollar. He said that he would never come here again. The number of Americans leaving the USA is astounding and yet, the US gov't doesn't publicly reveal that information. They claim that only track immigrants not emigrants. I really hate to say this but WE have all been conditioned to tolerate things that we should not. It's never too late to educate yourself for tomorrow though.
I've been asking the same question, tech junkie. The stated reason for the port shut down from the start was to support a threatened union in the state of Washington. This means that an OWS movement that was formed to oppose the financial corruption of the political process is in open alignment with organized labor, which in my state buys more politicians than anybody. "We oppose money in politics...unless it's our money going to our politicians." Hypocrisy, pure and simple.
Exactly. No leadership, no focused thought out reason or rationality. Train wreck. The truth of it is though - OWS was not formed to oppose financial corruption. It was formed by anarchists to promote anarchistic principles and ideas and direct democracy.
No one asked you to choose what we will or will not "sacrifice". You are not some noble warrior fighting for the little guy, you are enacting your will on others because you want to. You may not be greedy for money like Wall Street, but you certainly are greedy.
Not sure how you can know whether I'm greedy or not. It's ironic that you believe that I'm imposing anything on you and yet you will tolerate unjustified wars, murders, corrupt capitalism, corrupt jurisprudence and unfair tax laws that are imposed on you and your fellow Americans all the time. It makes no sense to me how people can be so egocentric that they are able to separate the plight of others from themselves. But, I suppose it's easier to compartmentalize. I've had to sacrifice many things including my job in order to do the right thing and not support unethical workplace behaviors so I do know what an financial burden that toll can take on a family. I paid dearly in the short term. However, it was just money and employment that I lost for 10 months and in the meantime, though I was seriously struggling to survive, the company I worked for was investigated and held accountable. I'm no hero or noble warrior. I just did what I knew was the right thing to do for my country. If more Americans would do the right things like not support stores that capitalize on slave labor and unfair trade practices then our economy and the world economy would benefit long term. But, so many people live with so much uncertainty and fear that they never question the ethics of the status quo because it's easier than trying to change a corrupt system. I completely understand that even though I personally can't justify that kind of tolerance in my life.
This^^^. It's all fine and dandy for the people in power to enact endless forms of injustice on the 99% in American and the working class all over the world, but if OWS costs a few workers a day's wage, then they are tyrannical and selfish.
Not a bit of logic, informed intelligence or concern for our future. This type of thinking has been around since humanity and why we are in the worst economic crisis to ever span America. Americans are spoiled by and addicted to instant gratification without any foresight and as long as they have what they need, it's easier for them to ignore the plight of others and just toss a dollar into the Salvation Army bucket while thinking they have solved some family's crisis. What really boggles me though is that a person who believes that losing a day's pay would drastically hurt a worker's financial security should realize that the person losing the pay isn't earning enough to begin with and then ask themselves WHY that is! Do they realize how many mothers and fathers lose a day's pay due to having to stay home with their sick child? What about the person who loses a day's pay because of a death in the family. What about those who lose a day's pay for being 10 mins late to work because of a traffic jam. I lost an entire week's worth of pay waiting on Verizon to come fix my phone service. Did Verizon reimburse me? HELL NO. I was promised every single day that they would show up between 7am and 7pm and they would even call and confirm the appointment. A week went by, me calling them every durn hour. My boss thankfully, understood and just shook her head in disgust ( NOT disbelief)- but I lost a week's worth of pay!!! Some folks just say, " Well, that's just the way things are these days". But, I know and you know that they don't have to be this way.
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We are the front-line workers who haul container rigs full of imported and exported goods to and from the docks and warehouses every day. We have been elected by committees of our co-workers at the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle and Tacoma to tell our collective story. We have accepted the honor to speak up for our brothers and sisters about our working conditions despite the risk of retaliation we face. One of us is a mother, the rest of us fathers. Between the four of us we have six children and one more baby on the way. We have a combined 31 years of experience driving cargo from our shores for America’s stores.
We are inspired that a non-violent democratic movement that insists on basic economic fairness is capturing the hearts and minds of so many working people. Thank you “99 Percenters” for hearing our call for justice. We are humbled and overwhelmed by recent attention. Normally we are invisible.
Today’s demonstrations will impact us. While we cannot officially speak for every worker who shares our occupation, we can use this opportunity to reveal what it’s like to walk a day in our shoes for the 110,000 of us in America whose job it is to be a port truck driver. It may be tempting for media to ask questions about whether we support a shutdown, but there are no easy answers. Instead, we ask you, are you willing to listen and learn why a one-word response is impossible?
We love being behind the wheel. We are proud of the work we do to keep America’s economy moving. But we feel humiliated when we receive paychecks that suggest we work part time at a fast-food counter. Especially when we work an average of 60 or more hours a week, away from our families.
There is so much at stake in our industry. It is one of the nation’s most dangerous occupations. We don’t think truck driving should be a dead-end road in America. It should be a good job with a middle-class paycheck like it used to be decades ago.
We desperately want to drive clean and safe vehicles. Rigs that do not fill our lungs with deadly toxins, or dirty the air in the communities we haul in.
Poverty and pollution are like a plague at the ports. Our economic conditions are what led to the environmental crisis.
You, the public, have paid a severe price along with us.
Why? Just like Wall Street doesn’t have to abide by rules, our industry isn’t bound to regulation. So the market is run by con artists. The companies we work for call us independent contractors, as if we were our own bosses, but they boss us around. We receive Third World wages and drive sweatshops on wheels. We cannot negotiate our rates. (Usually we are not allowed to even see them.) We are paid by the load, not by the hour. So when we sit in those long lines at the terminals, or if we are stuck in traffic, we become volunteers who basically donate our time to the trucking and shipping companies. That’s the nice way to put it. We have all heard the words “modern-day slaves” at the lunch stops.
There are no restrooms for drivers. We keep empty bottles in our cabs. Plastic bags too. We feel like dogs. An Oakland driver was recently banned from the terminal because he was spied relieving himself behind a container. Neither the port, nor the terminal operators or anyone in the industry thinks it is their responsibility to provide humane and hygienic facilities for us. It is absolutely horrible for drivers who are women, who risk infection when they try to hold it until they can find a place to go.
The companies demand we cut corners to compete. It makes our roads less safe. When we try to blow the whistle about skipped inspections, faulty equipment, or falsified logs, then we are “starved out.” That means we are either fired outright, or more likely, we never get dispatched to haul a load again.
It may be difficult to comprehend the complex issues and nature of our employment. For us too. When businesses disguise workers like us as contractors, the Department of Labor calls it misclassification. We call it illegal. Those who profit from global trade and goods movement are getting away with it because everyone is doing it. One journalist took the time to talk to us this week and she explains it very well to outsiders. We hope you will read the enclosed article “How Goldman Sachs and Other Companies Exploit Port Truck Drivers.”
But the short answer to the question: Why are companies like SSA Marine, the Seattle-based global terminal operator that runs one of the West Coast’s major trucking carriers, Shippers’ Transport Express, doing this? Why would mega-rich Maersk, a huge Danish shipping and trucking conglomerate that wants to drill for more oil with Exxon Mobil in the Gulf Coast conduct business this way too?
To cheat on taxes, drive down business costs, and deny us the right to belong to a union, that’s why.
The typical arrangement works like this: Everything comes out of our pockets or is deducted from our paychecks. The truck or lease, fuel, insurance, registration, you name it. Our employers do not have to pay the costs of meeting emissions-compliant regulations; that is our financial burden to bear. Clean trucks cost about four to five times more than what we take home in a year. A few of us haul our company’s trucks for a tiny fraction of what the shippers pay per load instead of an hourly wage. They still call us independent owner-operators and give us a 1099 rather than a W-2.
We have never recovered from losing our basic rights as employees in America. Every year it literally goes from bad to worse to the unimaginable. We were ground zero for the government’s first major experiment into letting big business call the shots. Since it worked so well for the CEOs in transportation, why not the mortgage and banking industry too?
Even the few of us who are hired as legitimate employees are routinely denied our legal rights under this system. Just ask our co-workers who haul clothing brands like Guess?, Under Armour, and Ralph Lauren’s Polo. The carrier they work for in Los Angeles is called Toll Group and is headquartered in Australia. At the busiest time of the holiday shopping season, 26 drivers were axed after wearing Teamster T-shirts to work. They were protesting the lack of access to clean, indoor restrooms with running water. The company hired an anti-union consultant to intimidate the drivers. Down Under, the same company bargains with 12,000 of our counterparts in good faith.
Despite our great hardships, many of us cannot — or refuse to, as some of the most well-intentioned suggest — “just quit.” First, we want to work and do not have a safety net. Many of us are tied to one-sided leases. But more importantly, why should we have to leave? Truck driving is what we do, and we do it well.
We are the skilled, specially-licensed professionals who guarantee that Target, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart are all stocked with just-in-time delivery for consumers. Take a look at all the stuff in your house. The things you see advertised on TV. Chances are a port truck driver brought that special holiday gift to the store you bought it.
We would rather stick together and transform our industry from within. We deserve to be fairly rewarded and valued. That is why we have united to stage convoys, park our trucks, marched on the boss, and even shut down these ports.
It’s like our hero Dutch Prior, a Shipper’s/SSA Marine driver, told CBS Early Morning this month: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”
The more underwater we are, the more our restlessness grows. We are being thoughtful about how best to organize ourselves and do what is needed to win dignity, respect, and justice.
Nowadays greedy corporations are treated as “people” while the politicians they bankroll cast union members who try to improve their workplaces as “thugs.”
But we believe in the power and potential behind a truly united 99%. We admire the strength and perseverance of the longshoremen. We are fighting like mad to overcome our exploitation, so please, stick by us long after December 12. Our friends in the Coalition for Clean & Safe Ports created a pledge you can sign to support us here.
We drivers have a saying, “We may not have a union yet, but no one can stop us from acting like one.”
The brothers and sisters of the Teamsters have our backs. They help us make our voices heard. But we need your help too so we can achieve the day where we raise our fists and together declare: “No one could stop us from forming a union.”
Thank you.
In solidarity,
Leonardo Mejia
SSA Marine/Shippers Transport Express
Port of Long Beach
10-year driver
Yemane Berhane
Ports of Seattle & Tacoma
6-year port driver
Xiomara Perez
Toll Group
Port of Los Angeles
8-year driver
Abdul Khan
Port of Oakland
7-year port driver
Five tokens, out of hundreds of workers who lost wages yesterday because of the Occupy movement.
phonies.
In any kind of strike or job action there are always problems with the inability of people to make an income as long as the strike continues. This is true both for people who support the job action as well as those who oppose it. But as an old Wobbly once explained to me, "sometimes you have a baby that is crying and cranky with colic. The baby doesn't like caster oil, but you feed it to him, he shits and feels better. Same rule applies to workers who oppose a strike." Of course it always makes more sense to have a super majority supporting a strike action than a bare majority or minority, but that's all part of the process of educating people toward class consciousness.
Brilliant PR move, comparing the people you claim to represent, and who are suffering because of misguided OWS tactics, to cranky, colicy babies! If this is how you treat the 99%, do you really expect us to listen to you? How arrogant can you get? "We know better than you what you need. Shut up and get out of our way while we make your life better." This is supposed to be an improvement over how corporations treat us? Seriously!? When you wonder why OWS popularity is in a free fall, come back and read this post.
Political discourse is a difficult and complex thing. I try to keep an open mind and be open to other points of view, but my bias is toward justice and democracy which admittedly can be elusive concepts. The Allies wanted to bring democracy to Nazi Germany, but they killed a lot of Germans (including clearly innocent Germans) in the process of doing that.
In general I don't think a simple majority is sufficient for most strike actions. To be successful most of the time in addition to having the active support of the vast majority of those involved strikes must also have considerable community support. But the number of times that I strike action has been universally supported by everyone in the community historically can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Some people will join such a circle of solidarity almost automatically. Others will join with very little gentle persuasion. That, after all is what democratic politics is all about, trying to convince someone of your point of view and being open to their point of view. Some people are convinced by more strenuous efforts. That's sort of the point of most passive resistance or nonviolent civil disobedience. It's meant to be disruptive of people's lives and in the course of such disruption, some people will be won over and others not. In some instances such conflict might rise to the level of violence on both sides. Even in those instances some people are won over even when violence is perpetrated on them or their comrades. That said, OWS as a movement remains committed to nonviolence as they believe that in this culture passive resistance is the best way to win people over, but passive resistance does not mean no resistance and it does involve the disruption of people's lives. Of course no social movement of any size, no matter how committed to nonviolence it is, can absolutely guarantee that all of its participants will be absolutely nonviolent, though given its size in my experience OWS has been remarkably well disciplined in its commitment to nonviolence.
Of course some people will never be won over no matter how compelling the argument or how strenuous the passive resistance any more than there are many elections wherein there is no dissention, no matter how strong the majority.
Of course we are a very tiny minority now. From the news reports that I have read, many from the main stream press, the public reaction to the west coast port shut down was genuinely mixed. Whether this event turns out to be, on the whole, a movement building experience or a set back for the movement remains to be seen, though most of the preliminary reports I have read suggest the former.
I am not suggesting that the effort for a coast wise port shut down was necessarily a wise move by OWS and I was initially skeptical of it for exactly many of the reasons that you raise. On the other hand political conflicts on this scale are seldom cut and dry or obvious and it is hard to argue with success. I'm truly not sure at this point whether the west coast port shut down was a movement building success or a set back for the movement and I will reserve judgement on that for a little while.
You can reserve judgment all you want. The declining popularity of OWS in every major poll taken since mid-November shows that lots of us are making up our minds, that a movement that views us as cranky babies who don't know what we need will not speak for us, despite their grandiose claims to the contrary. I predict that sociologists in the future will study OWS as a textbook case in how to run a potentially helpful movement straight into the ground.
I agree with you. My view - the anarchist model was useful in getting this movement started. Now it is holding the movement back from getting more serious and mainstream support.
This movement needs to lose the anarchy and get some real leadership and an effective organizational structure. Otherwise the anarchy will continue.
I also have a serious problem with how this movement uses Direct Action. Martin Luther King had four steps to Direct Action. Direct Action was the last resort. OWS started at step 4. I'm concerned about what steps 5, 6, and 7 will be.
Polls do show a diminuation of support for OWS, but based on the last polls I have seen there is still a substantial minority that support OWS, certainly in the range that any Republican Presidential candidate would be glad to have.
What more important, I think, and much harder to quantify, is the level of activism. As a part time occupier in half a dozen different occupations I get the impression that the activist base of OWS (as opposed to its passive supporters) is growing all the time. Of course that is much harder to quantify than a poll is. It is also more difficult to see after the evictions. Before the evictions I was often at an occupation in the middle of the night when passers by came to inquire about the movement. That is no longer possible and as a consequence the casual observer can quickly get the impression that the movement is dead or at least dying, but when I go to New York there are more Working Groups meeting daily than ever before. You just have to know where to look, which admttedly isn't easy.
I do not think that the movement views its supporters and those who it hopes to win over as cranky babies. If anything OWSers have a profound respect for both democracy and people from all walks of life. One of the main reasons why OWS very consciously avoids demands, for example is its self conscious awareness of exactly how small it is and how profoundly undemocratic it would be for such an unrepresentative group to raise demands for the vast majority. Once the movement is 100 or 1000 times bigger will be time enough to raise demands and on a much better basis as an expodentially larger movement will be much more genuinely representative of society as a whole.
I'm not sure if you are gratuitously hostile to OWS or not, but you seem serious. You suggest that it was potentially helpful but presumably at some point that potential was disappated. I don't agree but I would be most interested in exactly how and when you think OWS turned and developed less potential and given the decision making mechanisms that OWS employed from the beginning, how such a reversal of potential might have been circumvented.
I think that many people shared (and still share) the movement's frustration with bailouts and the status quo, and the early response was primarily positive to the picture of a bunch of camping Davids daring to take on the Goliaths of corruption and exploitation. But two mistakes turned the movement into an opponent, not the advocate, of the average person.
First, OWS fixated on an obviously unsustainable tactic of camping in public parks, riding that horse well past the end of it's effectiveness, provoking hostile reactions from businesses, authorities, and the general public that has been forced to pay to clean up their messes. A movement born to protest the misuse of public funds forced public funds to be spent on it's own existence - people aren't blind to the irony of that, but the movement seems to be. Also, the unhealthy attachment to outdoor camping guaranteed that, as weather turned colder, the less-zealous moderate voices would go home, leaving the movement in the hands of the more zealous extremists who predictable drove the movement hard to the left.
Also, OWS had a tin ear when I came to historical sensitivities of the average person. The first Oakland march included a street-wide banner that said "Death to Capitalism." Followed by the free use of the term "comrade" in the official proclamations (when "friend" or "fellow occupier" would have worked just as well) and poster graphics obviously reflecting 1930's Soviet-era communist propaganda posters, it's understandable that people would conclude OWS was anti-capitalist with communistic leanings. But the best way to get dismissed on this site is to point that out.
Yeah, I think there was some potential for good here. But I think it's been squandered. The average person will celebrate the end of the movement, which is coming soon, and whatever good may have come from it will have to come from other means.
I too have been skeptical of many aspects of OWS. However, as a large movement it is very difficult to control this or that aspect of its development or its perspective and despite your own skepticism regarding the continued growth of OWS it is very difficult to argue with success and it has been successful in some areas which I originally thought would be quite disaterous to it.
I have been active in social movements since 1964 and in my experience, in many ways OWS is the most politically mature social movement I have ever been involved in. For example, very early on, within days of when the occupation began it forged an alliance with sections of organized labor the likes of which have not been seen since the 1940s. In terms of institutional links the importance of this alliance cannot be underestimated. Of course there are elements both within and outside labor that try constantly to undermine that alliance and sometimes the movement itself does not necessarily make the best choices to sustain that alliance but by and large that alliance seems to be growing and strengthening.
While it is exciting to see the level of public support that the movement has recieved, and in many respects the level of support that the movement has recieved is far in excess of that of any new social, movement, I do not think that such polls, whatever their numbers, are the most useful measures of the movement's success. More important and much harder to gage are the number of people who are actively involved in the movement on a day to day basis. Again, while this is hard to quantify, my perception, attending GAs and Working Groups on a more or less regular basis is that them movement continues to grow, although that growth has slowed somewhat since the evictions.
Regarding the actual occupations themselves I think they are the defining characteristic of the movement itself. Whatever OWS is, without the effort to reclaim public space it is not an occupation movement. The very fact that the authorities are critical of the tactic is also part of what makes it important--it is a kind of visible, public, militant public edge of the movement and all successful movements of opposition have such an open, visible, militant cutting edge.
Mass movements always have many wings. Some people build a movement in the streets, a culture of opposition, and some people (many fewer people) translate the movement's goals into specific legislation. It is my own view that the most important component of this is the building of a culture of opposition, which is really something that we have not seen in this nation in living memory. Perhaps the labor movement of the early 1930s approached that sort of culture of opposition and certainly the Populist movement of the 1890s did, but no social movement in my lifetime has come close to that, not even the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, which came closest.
By a culture of opposition what I mean is a social movement that not only rejects many of the values of the dominant culture, but which has the social mass to be able to construct the outlines of at least an alternative vision. It was said that at its peak you could live your entire life inside the Populist movement. It's not just that there were meeting, rallies and protests, which, of course, there were, but their were encampments, newspapers, rooming houses, taverns, Populist Sunday schools, youth clubs, men's clubs, women's clubs, athletic clubs, reading groups and on and on.
There were the beginnings of exactly that kind of culture of opposition within the occupations. I met a jazz musician active in the New York occupation at a Washington occupation. He remarked that he could now go to any city in the nation and instantly find new friends, interesting conversation, something to eat and a place to sleep. I think that is something rather remarkable for someone who tours the nation for a living to say. And even as the occupations themselves alienate some people, they actually engage many more people. Virtually every skeptic I have met who has spent any time at an occupation has been transformed by it.
The notion of safety and sanitation seem like really bogus reasons for shutting down the occupations, especially when one considers how the occupiers were treated during the eviction and since. Whatever the health, safety and sanitary conditions at the occupations, the health and safety of the occupiers was certainly not improved by being beaten up by the police and subsequent to the evictions more than 200 people every have to scramble to find a place to stay every night, which also does not contribute to their health and safety. During the occupation Bloomberg complained about sanitation but refused to allow the occupation to install port a potties at its own expense, which seems like a contradiction to me.
In terms of the zealousness of the occupiers, the fact is the overwhelming majority of the initiators of the movement are strongly influenced by the anarchist intellectual tradition, a fact that they have never hidden and which is widely available in journalistic historical accounts of the movement's origins. So it is not that radicals attached themselves to the movement. They started it. They have also been responsible for its most successful developments, including an early alliance with sections of organized labor which has an organizational vision about as far from anarchism than can be imagined.
The explicitly anti-corporate and even anti-capitalist vision and slogans are also not something that attached itself to the movement as some kind of latter day after thought. Just look at the top of his page. It says "the revolution continues world wide." Liberals who attached themselves to the movement later on tend to view this as hyperbole, but the initiators take it quite seriously. That is the point. It was liberals who came into a movement initiated by radicals, not the other way around.
I too was confounded by the frequent use of the term "comrade" in the movement, though most new comers seem to treat that kind of language with some bemusement, though it is important to note that while it is a French term it long preceeds the rise of Stalinism and was a commonplace among radicals in the 19th century. Also, if you really become active in the community it soon becomes evident that a comrade is something different than a friend the way it is commonly used. A comrade is a political collaborator while a friend denotes a personal relationship.
In terms of whether opportunities have been squandered, that is hard to say and harder to do anything about. While I think it is perfectly just to take issue with the democratic character of commonly used parliamentary procedural practices, I'm personally not at all convinced that the consensus model of the GAs is entirely an improvement, though I think the search for an improvement is valid and justified. Meanwhile the existing decision making processes of OWS are extremely sluggish and the influence of the individual limited. On the other hand the individual can have considerable influence on the movement. Precisely because the movement does not raise its own demands or slogans, activists are encouraged to raise their own. To the extent that they catch on they can really affect the direction of the movement, but that is the market place of ideas.
In terms of a movement squandering opportunities, I have seen that very recently and OWS is nowhere near that yet. I am referring to the Green Party a year or two before or after the first Nader campaign. Over 130,000 people had volunteered for that campaign. If the movement had acted quickly (within say three months of the election) it might have forged those tens of thousand of volunteers into a serious political challenge. Instead (largely because of its own inexperience) it squandered that possibility and over the next several years was transformed into little more than another left wing sectlet (a very good sectlet, but a sectlet nonetheless). OWS is nowhere near that sort of tragedy yet and there are no inevitabilities in history and nothing to suggest that it must move in a sectarian direction, though an abandonment of sectarianism is by no means an abandonment of militancy. Indeed if the movement is not to go the way of the Populists and other social movements that went into the Democratic Party to survive its independence and its militancy are essential to its survival and growth.
Thanks for a thorough and thoughtful (though long) reply. The most interesting part from my perspective is your statement that the movement was radical, anti-capitalist, and anarchist from the start. You are first pro-OWS poster on this forum who I have seen admit that. In fact, I have seen people (including myself) taken to task for making assumptions that the more radical voices speak for the movement. We are told things like "It's a big tent, you can't control the extremists, yadda yadda yadda." Thank you for confirming what many of us have noticed, but few have admitted. And this fact will I think lead to it's dismissal by the vast majority of people, who do not share it's anarchist and anti-capitalist philosophy. I appreciate your take on it, but I still think its a downhill slide from here.
The initiators of the movement, while strongly influenced by the anarchist intellectual tradition, never made a secret of their political views. It's all over the place from even before the first occupation began. All anybody has to do is look. Just look at the top of this page. It says: The revolution continues world wide. And you'd have to be blind not to see it.
But the initiators of the movement have been very, very effective in many ways. One of the ways that they have been effective is the alliance that they have built with sections of organized labor, the first such alliance between organized labor in America and the radical intelligentcia since the 1940s. Another incredible job of outreach that they have done is in the liberal community and among the politically uninitiated. While most of those who initiated the movement were consciously radical, they are very conscious of the fact that their views are not shared by most of the public. Their response to this is not to hide their views but rather to find points of convergence between themselves and the wider community and they have been very successful at this.
The vast majority of OWS activists are undoubtedly either liberal or without any strongly developed political philosophy and there is tremendous differences among them on matters of strategy and tactics. The consequence of this is that even though they far outnumber the radicals in OWS, because they do not seem to be able to organize themselves coherently as a group, it is a more radical agenda that tends to dominate, but we need to be clear about what constitutes a radical agenda and it is not always something hat would be unacceptable to a broader public.
The natureal habitat of the liberals is in sub groups like the Demands Working Group. It is the liberals more than any other tendency within OWS that is frustrated with the fact that OWS has yet to raise any specific demands. But the liberals themselves after several months can't agree on a set of demands, much less convince a skeptical GA to adopt them. Ironically, also, the liberals tend to be much more impatient than the radicals. They tend to see the crisis easily solved by some nostrum like campaign finance reform while the radicals see this as a much more complicated and long term affair that will at least take years, probably decades and very possibly several life times to solve.
The radicals themselves a far from being totally united and in lock step with each other, but they are disciplined in the sense of following the rules of the GA, being patient and allowing for a diversity of view points and ideas.
The key to their success has been in accepting people where they are. They built an alliance with labor very early on by unconditionally supporting ongoing labor struggles without precondition even though the values and world view of most labor leaders are 180 degrees from their own. They have done the same thing with other social sectors. They have built an alliance with the minority community by joining in the stop stop and frisk movement. They are building an alliance with people whose homes have been foreclosed and the homeless by occupying foreclosed homes and providing people with a place to stay.
They have not been so successful in building an alliance with the genteel middle class yet precisely because it is the genteel middle class. OWS is a movement after all. The point of a movement is that people move. When sections of the genteel middle class become more resitve, less timid and more inclinded to stand up against being pushed around than is currently the case, then OWS will be able to build a closer alliance with it. The point here is that OWS often doesn't start things. Very often its most efficetive work in terms of buiding alliances has been to come out in solidarity with other movements already in existence and that are, in many instances already engaged in struggles involving civil disobedience themselves.
OWS is a tiny movement. Generously it is not more than 200 thousand in a nation of more than 300 million, but it is still a sizable movment. What is astonishing is not the activities of a "radical fringe" (I'm not sure what that means as their is nothing especially radical about gratuitous violence, which is what I think the critics are referring to). What is astonishing is how little violence there has been in a movement of this size. indeed much of the support which OWS has recieved has been because of percieved police violence againsst apparently peaceful (if law breaking) demonstrators.
This is not to say that OWS has not made mistakes. That is inevitable in any social movement, though I think the very worst mistake it could made would be to acceed to a quiescent middle class, literally fold its tents and become little more than an appendage of the Democratic Party, the institution that has been responsible for co-opting and eviserating every social movement since the Populists more than 100 years ago.
I thought that the mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge was a mistake, but as it turns out exactly the opposite was the case and the movement grew expodentially as a result. I am not sure about the coast wise action on the coast on the 12th. Reports that I am getting from participants is that the media went out of its way to find opponents of the action. I don't know. Time will tell. Tactical miscalculations are often made but I am not yet prepared to say whether this was a miscalculation or not. Clearly labor was divided on the issue, but from what I can see so far that divide has more to do with bureacuratic divisions in the labor movement and specific provisions in labor law that legally prohibited more active support from elected labor officials. Even if most workers supported the action, if the ranks were more or less evenly divided, it is often not advisable to move forward on a militant action with only a simple majority, without overwhelming support. But none of that is clear to me yet.
What I do know is that the radical initiators of OWS have a much more coherent vision than does the mass base of liberals they were able to recruit so far. that it was they that recruited the liberals and not the other way around, which says something about both their vision and their organizing skills and that they have effectively recruited from other sectors of society which don't necessarily share their views such as organized labor, minorites and the homeless. In 40 years of political activism I have never seen any liberal group do such an effective job in such a short time. It would seem to me to be enough for the skeptics who are sympathetic to the movement to take a closer look at the political theories that are motivating the radicals in the movement and to ask, for example, what exactly is it that they mean by revolution.
Thanks. Eyes are tired. Going home now.
So you are saying that you as people are limiting the ability of other people in your same position to make money and support their family. This is just wonderful. Some 20 year olds can play God and tell me what to do with my life and money because they think they know what is best for me.
The mean age of the average OWS activist is 33 well past their 20s. Personally I'm 68 years old. The average age of a labor union member is probably not dissimilar to the average age of the rest of the population, probably in their late 30s or early 40s. It is true that social activism, including labor activism tends to engage the young, simply because of the energy it takes. (For example, if I put myself in a position where the probability of my arrest increased I would quickly face a health crisis if I did not have access to my meds---nevertheless, I'm considering it. Also, many people in their late 20s or early 30s are starting families which doesn't give them the discretionary free time to engage in social activism that they might have had a few years earlier, but that doesn't mean that they are not supportive of the movement.
Selfish reactions, to me, seem remarkably unChristian in a nation that claims to be so religious. Are we not our brothers's keeper? That to me is what solidarity is all about. It is true that militant job actions typically cause some sectors of the work force to loose wages and suffer in other ways. Not the least of these are the people who are actually engaged in the struggle. But even if the outcome is not victorious, the sense of social solidarity that comes out of such struggles is typically life changing.
I'm a young 50 year old :D I don't mind the physical activism but I own a super small company now and can't afford to spend too much time out there on the street. I participated in a lot of activism from 01-05 but at that time, everyone was under the influence of too many psychotropic medications and government handouts to be as receptive as they are today. I'm so relieved that some Americans finally woke up! I hope it's not too late.
So are you going to give these people money when and if you finally win?
In my personal vision of what the world will look like when we finally win we will no longer live in a money economy any more than a family functions on a money economy. If our loved one's are hungry we don't ask for a quid pro quo before we feed them. In the society I envision, every stranger will be like a family member.
I think there are communes for that.
But what if the whole world shared the values of a Christian commune rather than have those values isolated in tiny upopias. I know most people don't think that way---yet. But what if they did? That is our most radical project.
I would certainly agree that is radical. I personally would not want the whole world thinking the same way. Sounds like a robot world and very boring.
I'll take diversity (within reason of course, valuing human rights) anyday. I'll take the good with the bad. Hopefully more good. There is no such thing as utopia.
I think diversity is healthy and good. Why should I want Buddhists, for example, to become Christians? I think Buddhism is a beautiful philosophy and religion.
Small "utopias" is where that belongs. That's the most realistic way of putting such a utopian theory into practice. To scale it up into anything larger, particularly a world view, is beyond unrealistic. And I suspect would run into major difficulties of theory v practice.
If anything OWS has been a model of independent thinking. That, it seems to me has been the primary complaint regarding OWS from the Establishment and from skeptical lookers on. They constantly point to the fact that OWS has no demands. But it has no demands precisely because it realizes what a tiny movement it is and to raise demands at this early stage would be presumptuous and highly undemocratic until 100 or 1000 times more people than are currently engaged activate themselves, form GAs and join the movement. Far from imposing a single way of thinking, it is exactly the opposite on that question and invites the 99% to come as they are, as it were.
Utopian or intentional communities are facinating, but no way to change the world. For that you need to be engaged in the day to day activities of the 99%.
So you value the diversity of this movement ( everyone is their own demand) yet you say you want a society/utopia where everyone thinks the same or has the same values or beliefs?
I think that communes are rather fascinating also. They might be able to change the world. But I think they need to start small. If they are really so successful they will attract more people and grow. They would evolve naturally, and perhaps take over the world.
I don't think it would be premature at all for this movement to develop some focus. I think it would attract more support. Instead of shutting down ports and angering the general public, how about a focused collective action by this movement that would educate people about the damaging affects of the Citizens United decision. This would be a far more constructive endeavour. Campaign reform is one thing that has a snowballs chance of actually happening, that would be an enormous benefit to the 99%. This is something that I think would help grow the movement far more than shutting down ports.
I stated in the post below, I have a serious problem with the Direct Action of this movement. You can see my thoughts below on that in my post to kingscrossection.
I personally never said that I wanted everyone to think alike. I do think that the values of the Golden Rule are widely shared in our society, even though most people do not practice what they preach. I do think that practicing those values of truly loving one another would create a much more just, democratic, peaceful and loving society and it would not mean that everyone would think alike. All you have to do is go to one General Assembly and it is very clear that there is a tremendous diversity of thought in OWS, so much so that it is extremely difficult to get OWS activists to agree on anything.
So you want focus and you don't want everybody thinking alike. To me what you call focus IS people thinking alike and democracy is just the opposite of that.
My uderstanding of public perception of the port shut down at this point is that it is divided. Some people liked it and some people thought it was a great and successful idea. That is always the way with any social action. Some people like it and some people don't. The trick is to pick those social actions that not only the most people agree with but which the most people can engage in. The problem with notions like campaign finance reform, besides the fact that they will do nothing to actually smash the corporate state is that they basically tell people the opposite of becoming active. They tell people to go home and let the experts take care of it. An occupation or a GA or a labor solidarity action, well chosen, tells people that change is up to them, not some political leader and it is their responsibility to become active. That, it seems to me, is the most constructive thing you can do as it takes the notion of democracy literally and seriously.
Direct action may be well chosen or poorly chosen, but correctly chosen it is the very essence of democracy. It says, by its very existence, that it is up to us, all of us, the people, to create a society free of want, poverty, injustice and war, not up to the so-called professional experts who are the ones who got us into his trouble.
Right well good luck in neverland
I agree with you. I think these OWS Direct Action tactics are selfish and premature.
Martin Luther King said there are four steps to Direct Action and that it should basically be a last resort. I don't think we've fully covered Steps 1-3 yet. OWS started at Step 4. So I can only be left to wonder what steps 5, 6, and 7 will look like.
That is a very good point. Martin Luther King said:
Yesterday, the Occupy movement attempted to create a crisis, but for no purpose. They weren't trying to force anybody to make any kind of concessions. It wasn't a publicity move, since most of the media coverage related to yesterday's protest was harmful to the Occupy movement. It was a crisis for the sake of creating a crisis.
It seems to me that there is alot of work to do to educate the general public about the harmful affects of Citizens United. I would prefer to see OWS working on that in a more collective unified way rather than shutting down ports. Not only educating the general public about CU, but even OWS particpants. Like those participants at the ports. Who had no idea why there were even there! Except that they are angry and OWS gives them some disruptive purpose.
Educating people about CU would do more to build support for OWS than shutting down ports. There are so many more constructive things that could be done.
I don't believe that OWS has any intention of being constructive. They say they want a revolution, and I think they mean it literally. OWS ptb has it's own agenda. And it has nothing to do with working with government on anything so non-radical as reversing CU and enacting campaign reform, or anything like that.
A lot of us have fantasized about the Occupy movement becoming "unified" and/or productive. I think at this point that it's obvious that those hopes are unrealistic.
Agree. This movement needs to lose the anarchy and get some real leadership. The anarchist model that got this thing started has outlived its useful life. Now it's holding the movement back from being so much more. That is the sad thing about it all.
I don't see this movement changing. I think the OWS ptb like it just fine the way it is to push their agenda. All the cries from regular protesters for leadership and focus is just wasted breath.
Are you aware of the 99%Declaration? This group does have focus and a clear plan for making changes with and through government.
https://sites.google.com/site/the99percentdeclaration/
I heard recently that they were put back up as a working group within OWS, but I haven't checked it out for myself yet. May just be a rumor. Honestly, I like the idea of them being totally separate from OWS. I don't trust anything coming out of the NYCGA.
The anarchy thing is useful to some people. The labor leaders who organized the two separate shutdowns of the Port of Oakland benefit a lot from the anarchy thing. They can use the masses to avoid accountability for their actions. If anybody questions, "WHY shut down the port?", they can hide behind the vague and nebulous nature of the movement. All of the different forces that are trying to co-opt the Occupy movement for their own purposes benefit from the lack of focus and leadership. It's very useful for labor leaders to have a mob-for-hire available whenever they need one. I would expect those forces to put a lot of effort into preventing the Occupy movement from developing any sort of hierarchy that would create accountability for the people steering the mob.
So true! And it's no surprise labor jumped on board this train wreck right from the start. Direct Action is their bread and butter. I have nothing against organized labor Direct Action, so long as it is purposeful and targeted in a rational way.
The OWS anarchy is protection FOR the OWS anarchy. It's taking advantage of peoples legitimate frustrations to further the anarchy agenda. I don't know that it will take that much effort to prevent the movement from developing any real leadership or heirarchy. I think the anarchists have a grip on this movement and many many people are drinking the direct democracy koolaid. I'm actually shocked at how many people are so taken in by, what I think, is a dangerous concept. And I'm shocked at how many people in this movement tolerate it, and/or basically don't have a problem with it. I suppose that is an indication of just how much frustration and discontent there is in this country.
I don't think the Tea Party had these problems. Because there weren't anarchists running that thing. Not that the Tea Party is any perfect model of success. But I admire the way they got people elected into office. To me, that is the way to make legit change.
It seems to me there will be some kind of rebellion. There seems to have been an increased amount of talk on this forum about it in the past couple of weeks.
I'm not surprised. I haven't noticed that though. Any idea what step 5 might look like. Something to do with Dec 17?
They're (OWS ptb) not too subtle about their perceived need for a revolution. Only their reasons for it. And it's not Campaign Reform, or anything so non-radical, non-revolution like, and so utterly boring as that.
As far as I can tell December 17 is just a pre-party to their victory or something. Some celebration.
I get it, screw everyone else because YOU know what's best for them. That's the way to get more people on board, by making them mad at you. How does it feel sitting so high on the horse?
Incredible bonds of solidarity develop among people engaged in a common struggle, sacrificing together. Far from wanting to dictate anything to anyone, the primary reason why OWS does not raise any demands is precisely because it doesn't want to dictate anything to anyone. It is very conscious of the fact that it is a tiny, tiny movement, not really repesentative of anyone except the participants.
Once we have 10 or 20 million occupiers we will be in a better position to democratically set an agenda for the nation.
Keep taking money out of the pockets of everyday people and disrupting their lives and you will have 10 to 20 million people calling for your heads. You can't marginalize people and treat them as nothing more but the "uninformed masses" that need your guidance. Your small group is making the larger majority frustrated and soon it will become angry and OWS will be doomed because of its own ignorance and self piousness.
It baffles me, also, how these people think that their actions are going to make people more sympathetic to the Occupy movement. They claim to represent the American worker, but their actions directly harm American workers.
The naive words of slaves... "It only hurts me and the other drivers. We have jobs and families to support and feed. Most of them don't," Vega said.
I have a job, but I am still for OWS. I definitely would not mind if a major protest disrupted my work. It would be costing my boss money and not me. I would still get paid.
Two questions:
Why do you think it would be so cool for somebody to hurt your employer?
If a protester stopped you from working and it didn't hurt your employer but it did cost you a day's wages, THEN would you object?
You use your ideology, your extremist usage of the word "slaves", to justify directly costing American workers wages. For people who don't buy into your extremist 'slavery' language and ideology, you look more like a threat to the American worker than like anything that's helpful to anybody. If you can't explain what the intended purpose of the port shutdown was, then the purpose appears to have simply been to cause a disruption, which costs American workers. Right before Christmas. Congratulations!
Well said, tech!
Unfortunately, what I just said is probably similar to the extremist language of the Occupy movement, in that what I said makes a lot of sense to mainstream Americans but it probably doesn't make much sense to an Occupy ideologue. The idea that the Occupy movement's un-focused "direct action" is likely to be viewed as a threat to the 99% seems to be a totally foreign concept to the masses of protesters who are eager to act before thinking.
You've missed the point that Occupy is, in part, making a stand against how commercialism is ruining much of our society - Christmas especially included. I don't know the reasoning behind the timing of the port blockade, but it would not surprise me if the consideration regarding what major commercialized holiday was upcoming was of no concern at all - or perhaps it was of great concern and is why the action was not delayed until after the holiday.
For people who don't buy into your consumerist outlook, your incessant mentioning of the fact that the port blockade happened right before Christmas is likely to be strengthening the resolve of those who feel they need to take action to end the subversion of morality caused by commercialism.
I've had Christmas without presents before and it makes the holidays even better when family is spending quality time together rather than fiddling with their newest toys. Any action that causes individuals to buy/receive fewer presents on Christmas is doing said people a favor.
The only reason a protest movement which seeks economic justice for all Americans will ever be seen as a threat to the American worker is that the government wants you to think that. While you were busy obsessing over the costs to workers, did you ever stop to think what the sum of the financial sacrifices made by the protesters amounts to? I realize that there are no mainstream media newscasts or articles bringing this matter to the forefront, and so it must be difficult for you to know what you ought to think about it. The writing is on the wall, though - many affected workers have already spoken out in support of the actions and considered their own lost wages to be an involuntary sacrifice they are willing to accept for the greater good.
Not all of the workers are so selfish to only be concerned with their wages shortly before Christmas, so I don't understand why you feel so vindicated in arguing for the sake of those whom are.
I can see the harm done, but I can't see the benefit won. I do agree with you that the Occupy movement is obviously anti-capitalist.
So what if your boss decided to fire you instead of him losing money? You must be pretty valuable or have some kind of weird job. And are you intimating that you would gladly be OK with it costing you money (you don't seem to be because you're basically saying that as long as it is costing someone else THEIR money, you're fine with it)?
[Removed]
Please Post Your Recipe For Omelettes ... which doesn't require any eggs to be cracked ;-)
Egg free omelet
1 onion, diced 8-9 mushrooms, sliced 2 medium-sized zucchini, diced a dash of tamari or substitute 1/2 t. dried dill weed a dash of garlic & onion powder nutritional yeast (to taste) 2 lbs. (4 C.) medium-firm organic tofu, rinsed & drained 2 T. tahini 1 t. turmeric 2 T. nutritional yeast 2 T. tamari or substitute 1/2-1 T. herb seasoning (such as Herbamare)
omne vivum ex ovo ... ommm~{;-)
If you step on a big banker's leather shoe, then do you think it will hurt him? If you step on a little ant next to the banker, then do you think that it might kill him?
Your cute analogy doesn't change the fact that you're doing a lot more harm to the workers who lost hundreds of dollars than to the company that owns the port and the airport. Do you think that cracking a few 99% eggs in the name of protesting against the 1% is going to win more 99% sympathy? Or do you think that maybe you're going to become a more immediate and concrete threat to the well-being of the 99% in their minds than any kind of bank abstraction?
So let's all do nothing at all ... ever .. and continue tugging our forelocks at our betters who've got more wealth and power than us and So Must be our moral, intellectual and ethical superiors !
There is little hope for quiescent sheep if they won't even bleat a paltry & perfunctory protest for survival & self-respect, on the way to the slaughterhouse !!
Americans imagine themselves Lions but act like Sheep ; they get treated like Dogs but aspire to be Pussycats ; their emblem is an Eagle but they seem to take pride in behaving like Turkeys voting for Christmas !!!
Sometimes even incorrigible optimists like me will occasionally despair but Thank The Powers Of The Universe for OWS, who after only 3 months have begun to change the whole Political Conversation in The "Usurped States of Amnesiacs". After all, the quiescent and reactionary, posting on this thread are at least animated and engaged by The 'Occupy' Actions across the U$A ;-)
Keep Genuflecting To Your 'Superiors' "TechJunkie" and maybe you'll get noticed enough for one of Them to throw you a super-duper, iPad4 or something & ...
Ne Cede Malis.
[Deleted]
Hardworking people do not have a voice. Read more posts about that here at this site. It takes time to find them but they are there.
Their voice is at the ballot box. When you stand in the way of someone trying to make money you are only pissing them off. What you are doing is solidifying opposition. You started out on the wrong foot and as a consequence your movement will always be considered out of the mainstream.
The people that need to be heard are definitely not heard through the ballot box because they don't even show up to vote. Second highest voter turnout was in 2008 with 64.1% Americans voting. That is about 136 million Americans. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/world/americas/05iht-turnout.3.17552445.html More Americans watch the damn Superbowl. Sadly the conservatives are making it even harder for lower class citizens to vote by passing stricter voting registration laws. It is complete bull that it is to prevent voter fraud when there were 30 cases of voter fraud. Soon enough we will go to the days where people have to show proof of land ownership, be a middle to upper class white male, and women don't count as voters. Lets go back to the stone age men and women.
"Their voice is at the ballot box" : Their Choice is Demoblican or Republocrat !! + IF you have an Electronic Voting System (courtesy of Diebold Inc. etc) Your Vote might just get stolen anyway IF The Voter Registration 'System' isn't gerrymandered first !!!
That's NOT A Democracy : that's a demoCRAZY deMOCKERYcy ...
Re-read your post above "SupineSimon" and see how Defeatist, Negativist and "Kiss Up ; Kick Down" you sound ...
avaritia facit bardos !
You come from the mindset that I am an OWSer. I most assuredly am not.
LOL !!! If you think that I thought you were an OWSer then you are SO Wrong that its beyond my ability or vocabulary to tell you Just How Wrong You Are, lol !!
If Americans were anything like you "SupineSimon" in 1776, then you'd still be saying "Yes m'Lord" and paying taxes to your British Masters !
LTMFAL = Laughing Too Much For Any Latin ...
We'll see how many OWSers are voted into Congress in 2012, won't we?
OWS doesn't want to be part of Congress because any politician that thinks they can change something within this system is naive.
"SupineSimon" : Don't try to fool us or yourself that you give A SH!T for "The Masses" !! They will learn to speak up for themselves as Free Human Beings or join you on the way to the slaughterhouse ...
Dum vita est, spes est.
Yes, OWSers will finally figure it out.
It seems like you could use all of that same rhetoric to justify stabbing my grandmother in the eye with a shrimp fork.
"DO something! [stab][stab]"
"Uh but sir, WHY are you stabbing that nice old lady in the eye?"
"Because Americans are sheep and we have to DO something! We have to break a few eggs! [stab] [stab]"
"But what are you accomplishing?"
"I'm DOING something!"
I'm sure that you know what you mean but I haven't a f**kin' clue what you're talking about !! Stick to genuflecting ... et aut agere aut mori ...
https://sites.google.com/site/the99percentdeclaration/
Hmm...same thing the "useful idiots" of Stalin's purges said. Not that I'm equating the two issues but it is the same kind of thinking.
It may have cost a load, but there is the fact that now the drivers know that if they seek to gain better working conditions, they will have support of at least a portion of the populace.
I wish when I was still able to work (owner-operator) driving that I knew that there was someone other than other drivers and my family that gave a damn.
You think that better working conditions for truck drivers was the purpose of yesterday's attempted shutdown of multiple shipping ports? How does forcing other people to lose wages help them?
This is a fascinating argument. The State of Alabama could use this argument to say that their new immigration law is actually intended to "protect" immigrant workers from poor working conditions. You know, for their own good...
LOL, drivers are mercurial creatures, I know I was one. Today they are p-o'd about missing a load, tomorrow they will be p-o'd about having to pull an extra one.
The simple fact is that drivers know they aren't seen. Oh someone sees the rig, but never the person behind the wheel. Some of them are good with this, just as long as they get paid, most would like to be viewed as people, and not part of that rig.
KNOWING that they are seen, that they are acknowledged as people and not part of a machine goes a long way.
Have you ever sat at a port with out access to bathroom facilities? I have and I was not a port driver, I was over the road, just happened to end up there with my reefer to unload. It was dehumanizing. At least the 'roach coach' showed up.
It doesn't matter why the attempt was made to shut down the port, because now there are drivers who are demanding that they all be recognized as human beings. I guarantee you that the ones who complained yesterday, will not be complaining if they too, get that recognition.
"It doesn't matter why the attempt was made to shut down the port, because now there are drivers who are demanding that they all be recognized as human beings."
That sentence is fascinating and horrifying at the same time. When did Occupy become about fighting for truckers, against their will? Wasn't all of this supposed to be about Wall Street? The intended benefit that justifies the cost of the protests was enhanced self-esteem among truck drivers? Really?
Hmmm, Occupy Wall Street on the west coast...nope don't work.
Just admit you don't get it and let it go...other wise it's just a waste of your time.
I openly admit that I don't understand WHY, and that's why I keep asking WHY.
I'm not the only person asking these questions.
At least you are trying to find an understanding.
The main issues are government and money, rather money buying government. This has been going on for far longer than I can remember...it's about putting government back into the hands of the people, all the people, giving all of us a say in how we are governed at all levels.
The foreclosure crisis is a symptom of all that is wrong with our present government, the port drivers is one of many other symptoms and each symptom needs to be examined before we can understand the full extent of the disease.
So even if shutting down the ports was a longshoremen agenda, it also brought a willingness for the port drivers to express their angst and a platform to do it with. So for the drivers it doesn't matter why, only that it was, only that they now see an opportunity to make their voices heard.
There are always going to be some who are, if not satisfied with the status quo, too afraid to see it changed, even if that change would make even small improvements...a driver who doesn't need a bathroom will holler about not being able to pick up another load, a driver who needs a bathroom wants that bathroom, the load can wait or someone else can take it.
The self esteem issue...isn't really about self esteem, it's acknowledgement that the people who make those machines run are not part of the machine itself. That they have a different value and need different considerations.
In a way OWS is like a knitted sweater, it's all interlocking whether it appears so or not. It's not about truckers or foreclosed homes or jobs or money in government or Wall Street, it is about all of it and so much more, it's about the fabric of our society, it's been unraveling for over 30 years, if it isn't stopped there won't be any fabric left.
Trying to be about everything makes the movement be about nothing. Is the Occupy movement simply a disruption service? Available to be hijacked by any niche labor issue? The cost of not deciding what you're all about is that other people will define that for you. That appears to me to be what's happening here. The Occupy movement can't figure out what it's about, so it's getting pushed around and manipulated and used by people who DO have clear objectives. And a lot of protesters are participating without questioning why, because they don't care why. They're protesting for the sake of protesting. As you said, they're "not satisfied with the status quo", and so they seek to create disruptions for the people who ARE satisfied with the status quo. With no clear objectives other than that.
They seem to be generally anarchistic, anti-capitalist in nature, just going from one venue to another trying to stop commerce, whether it be blocking bank lobbies, department store entrances, ports, anything they think will "hurt" the man.
Yes, I agree. Vague and nebulous anti-establishment sentiments, enabled. Is that a good thing? I'm not convinced. Mobs with no clear direction or focus are easily co-opted. The Occupy movement has obviously been co-opted by labor leaders, but nobody seems to see any kind of problem with that.
As I stated in a previous reply, it's all interconnnected.
OWS isn't just Wall Street, it's every where and what isn't at Wall Street is some place else.
So the West Coast Occupies are about west coast issues along with the national issues...
I think when someone says support too many see it as a bid for money, and there's support this, support that. It isn't money that is support, although for money does help (please check this link http://www.the99declaration.org/ ) for some things.
Support is simply acknowledgement that there are issues, that voices have been raised and that more can be raised.
It's awareness that there is no quick fix, that one thing changed doesn't mean an end to awareness.
I'd like to meet some people who are satisfied with the status quo, who wouldn't like more for themselves to see more influence on government by people than money...I haven't met any yet.
So if raising awareness, or gaining support wasn't the goal, and winning some kind of concession in some kind of negotiation wasn't the goal, then creating a disruption was the only goal? Protesting for the sake of protesting? With no regard for how the message is received by the mainstream?
Tell you what, engage in a GA, that will explain better than any individual could.
Actions like the one yesterday make me FAR less likely to invest any of my time participating in a GA or in anything else related to this nebulous and unfocused movement that has no concern for wasting time on ineffective action or causing collateral damage.
Unapologetically costing thousands of workers hundreds of dollars in lost wages two weeks before Christmas was one of the most amazingly stupid PR moves that the Occupy movement possibly could have made. Why would that make me want to participate?
Then why be here on this forum? Since it is a waste of time that is...
I originally came here as a potential supporter in early October, and I found that there was nothing to support. Then I did some recruiting, and I hired the only person who inquired after weeks of offering a job with free training. Then it basically became entertainment. I spent a day after the first shutdown of the Port of Oakland asking WHY over and over. I got a lot of different rationalizations, and none of them had anything to do with the actual reason that the Occupy Oakland GA used as their justification.
What that tells me is that protesting is the goal. Protesting for the sake of protesting. Regardless of who it might harm, or whether it might be counter-productive to the movement. I find it disappointing, entertaining, and sad, all at the same time.
So it's the Occupy Oakland you have issue with?
Take a look at this link and see if there is anything that interests you beyond entertainment.
http://www.the99declaration.org/
Thanks Pandora...you articulated my thoughts very well. I was also trying to explain that it is a mindset, a fundamental business and economic philosophy that led to the demise of our sovereignty and our current economic crisis. It's the mindset of the consumer as well as the corporations that must change.
Thank you for your complement.
I'm trying to understand this situation. Port bathrooms would seem to be a very minor expense for these companies to provide. I'm sure the issue has been broached at some point. What was the answer? Are they afraid of something else that have to do with providing these bathrooms? It certainly isn't the money. Are they afraid that it will just be one thing after another if they "give in" on this bathroom thing, that the drivers will then move on to the next "thing" they need? I get why truckers are mad. I get why trucking companies don't want to deal with a lot of different individual "need" considerations. They pay by the load so that the incentive to work hard is on the drivers, so that their product will arrive at the stores on time. They want efficiency, certainty of cost and delivery. I have no idea why they could not provide bathrooms. Maybe it's something regarding legal liability for people getting assaulted in restrooms or whatever (truckers are an unusual collection of people), I don't know. The pay is what the pay is. It is supply and demand as usual. You have a lot of young country boys like my brother-in-law that are truckers and don't have much choice in doing it. Not much education, grow up working on their trucks, enjoy the freedom of the road, get into it and then have a family and can't get back out.
I'm thinking that the ports feel no need to supply facilities for the drivers because drivers are not employed by the port. Some are independents some drive for companies either way the port holds no responsibility toward them for even something as simple as toilet facilities.
Porta toilets are pretty cheap and serviced by septic companies for a reasonable price, so liability would be minimized.
The few times I had to pick up at a port when I was on the road, I asked about facilities and was told there was no obligation on the part of the Port Authority to provide them.
And yes, truckers are sometimes a different breed...for years we were known as the last of the 'cowboys'.
How could the Occupy movement have possibly been detoured from protesting against corporate greed, to protesting about bathrooms for truck drivers? How could this have possibly happened without somebody saying, "Wait, stop, why are we doing this?"
It's an Oakland issue and I guess the Oakland GA decided to accept it, either way, I assume the port drivers are also showing support for OWS.
They made it a west-coast issue, not an Oakland issue. Why? For what benefit to Occupy?
Asking me is asking the wrong person. I just know drivers.
Occupy is about fighting for a better life for everybody. Why can't the 1% put in some measly toilets for these employees to use? Its not specifically why I'm here, but I can see how fighting to give our fellow 99% more rights fits in with the overall message.
Occupy is looking out for the little man, wherever he may be. Its not just about stopping Wall Street, but all of the injustices and abuses that stems from it.
There are a million heads on the 1% hydra, and Occupy is trying to cut as many of them off as they can. Give them a break.
You aptly describe my brother-in-law, a cowboy if you ever saw one.
Been there done that. I owmed several trucks, had a small firm, drove at least one trip a month so I'd never forget that it was the drivers that made sure the wheels kept turning.
Got out of it in '99 when my health wouldn't let me keep it up any longer.